About
Hey, I’m Matt - a Principal Engineer at AWS, living in Melbourne, Australia 馃嚘馃嚭. I build things and write up the bits worth keeping.
Lately, that’s mostly:
- Building tools in Python - mostly Pydantic, PydanticAI, FastAPI and AWS Strands. I like typed code, and agents do a lot of the boring work.
- Playing with open-source LLMs - Qwen, GLM and friends running locally on a Framework Desktop and a DGX Spark. Lately I’ve been testing OCR and vision models for fun.
- Running a homelab - Raspberry Pis, an old Synology NAS, Dell OptiPlex Micros and the bigger AI boxes, all joined by Tailscale and running lots of containers under Docker Swarm and Portainer.
- Living in the terminal - Claude Code and Opus daily, Ghostty on the Mac with herdr inside it, and endless tinkering with my Linux and Claude Code configs.
- Making apps - Into Flutter lately, after plenty of Swift and React Native. Backends usually built with CDK on AWS.
- Talking about it - I speak at user groups and conferences like AWS re:Invent and PyCon AU, make the odd YouTube video, and used to host a stream called Devs in the Shed.
At work I ship software and worry about how it’ll behave under real load. My backends usually start as FastAPI modular monoliths, with services split out only when something genuinely needs to scale on its own.
coles.codes is a bit ironic now because I don’t type much code myself. I write the spec, prompt an AI and edit what comes back, though I still write the odd bit artisanally.
Outside work I’m usually reading or gaming at home with my wife and our cats, and I take my coffee seriously - half these posts started over one.
Opinions here are my own, not my employer’s.
