About
Perpetual student of how organisations build great software.
I'm Matthew. I build software, platforms and the teams behind them.
I've worked across retail, payments, investment banking and platform engineering. Every domain has its own constraints, but good engineering looks remarkably similar. The technologies change. The fundamentals rarely do.
These days I spend as much time thinking about organisations as technology. Good software is rarely just the result of good code. It's the product of sensible architecture, clear incentives, thoughtful governance and hundreds of small decisions that compound over time.
I'm naturally suspicious of hype, buzzwords and silver bullets. AI is changing software engineering in ways that genuinely matter, but it doesn't replace engineering judgement. Clear thinking, sensible trade-offs and strong fundamentals are still what separate good systems from fragile ones.
Outside work you'll usually find me playing chess, running distances that most people would consider unnecessary, or consuming enough coffee to keep a small distributed system alive.
This site is where I think in public. It's a collection of ideas, experiments and side projects, along with the occasional mistake that seemed much smarter before I built it. If something here helps you build better software (or avoid making one of my mistakes) then it has done its job.
In the papers
For the chess, not the software: the national press has so far shown admirable restraint on the subject of platform engineering.