About me

Leon Matthews

My name is Leon Matthews. I'm a software engineer in my late-40s living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. I live in an eco-house I built with my wife and share with my two teenage kids. We have a dog, a cat, and we keep chickens and bees for their... excretions.

Work

I've programmed since childhood. Microcomputers using BBC Basic & 6502 assembly, then onto the desktop with Delphi & C++, before moving onto the web using first PHP, then Python/Django, and latterly Rust.

Currently, I take contract work from my dedicated office at home (CV available on request), mostly Python/Django and data wrangling. Program correctness is a special interest. I aim for 100% automated test coverage of the code I write, and have come to appreciate the strengths of strongly-typed Python, using Mypy in strict mode to check my projects whenever possible.

After spending all day programming for clients, my private time tends to be spent on other things, but I do play around with several Open Source Projects. I've spent much of this year learning Rust. It's been a hell of a learning curve, but I love its expressiveness and the way it compliments Python.

This Website

The tagline for this website is "In Pursuit of a Sense of Wonder" — that sublime feeling you get when a flash of understanding hits. That's what I'm attempting to write about, but what I actually achieve might only be a sort of show-and-tell for nerds like me. We'll see.

Like most nerds, I jump from obsession to obsession. I learn everything there is to know about some topic or hobby, then move on to the next one. The projects section of this website will be full of whatever I'm into currently.

No Socials

I make my living by thinking hard & concentrating for long periods of time. I optimised my work environment to eliminate interuptions. The mental health and productivity gains where such that I have expanded that to after-hours too. This website serves as my only social media, a sort of write-only sharing.