hi, i'm matt. i'm a programmer at a fixed-income financial services firm in houston, tx. this site is part portfolio, part archive, part place to think out loud. you could even say it serves as an insight into my own world for anyone who happens to wander in.
developer
generalist, by temperament and by job. every machine a trader at our firm touches, i've assisted with at some point... the desktops they sit at, the servers behind them, the internal tooling that connects everything together. desktop, server, glue, help desk, everything in between. the work pulls me across the stack: greenfield product engineering one week, debugging a long-lived vba macro the next.
day-job stack is azure, copilot, terminal, vscode, formerly vba (which still hold a dear place in the enterprise reality i operate inside). outside of work it's local-first: ollama, huggingface, pycharm, terminal, python, plus whatever open-weights model i can get my hands on this week. i lean on ai both to learn faster and to make the things i build at home more enjoyable to build.
essentially, anything involving silicon and input/output is interesting to me. the cpu running a trade, the dsp in a synth running a patch, the same problem at different scales.
a working principle, if i have one: tools are meant to be used appropriately, and how much you use a tool depends on how much you understand when it should be used. more understanding, more leverage; less understanding, the tool is using you. that goes for languages, frameworks, large language models, and pretty much everything else.
musician
i make music as verism RIP. drifting from hip-hop into electronic lately. one-offs, released when they're done. no, there is no album cycle and no schedule. just whatever finishes itself. music is a hobby in the literal sense: physical audio, being both a part of the machine and experiencing it, is one of the few things that resets how i think.
listen on spotify or apple music.
currently
working through programming windows (petzold) and programming windows with mfc (prosise) to understand how winui fundamentally works. going back to the foundational texts before reading the modern docs that abstract over them is great. every modern abstraction reads differently once you know what it's abstracting.
say hi
email is the best way to reach me! matt@mattdoes.online. i read every email; notifications can be missed.