I’m not a writer, but I feel like I wanna write things. So lets get to it.

I’m not gonna bury the lead lede.

I do blame Aaron Francis for me writing this blog. His constant fantastic takes about trying hard, the value of working in public, and a story that I believe he has told but I cannot find a blog post on about how the creator of Tailwind didn’t actually think to publish it as Tailwind until a bunch of people said “That’s neat! publish that!” made me realize I should give this a shot. I’ve got a lot of stuff to offer, and I’m working on too many things for how little time I have, but here we are. Literally the day I wrote this Aaron tweeted this:

So I guess I am beating your inspiration to the punch!

An Introduction

Now that the lead is no longer buried: Hi, I’m Matt. I write code, have been doing so for more than a decade. Mostly on the server. But more recently I’ve been working at my first full stack gig at General Motors where I write code for race cars, or at least race car teams. I’m married to an awesome lady that teaches high school and we’re attempting to adopt a kid. I enjoy cars and games of the video and board and card varieties. I’m kinda a typical nerd.

How I got here

So a few months ago a friend of mine made a joke about finding consultants using ChatGPT, we laughed, and then I asked what this “database” he wanted was. That sent me down a rabbit hole of no-code toolings such as Appsmith and then realized I’d rather just write it myself. That lead me down the path of full stack frameworks and then to Laravel. Between its stellar community, including the like of Aaron himself, along side the likes of Josh Cirre and others, the entire community is all about building, and more importantly, shipping your products. So I’m going to be making a bid for that contract when the final spec is written. I already have a neat little proof of concept for them. I also now have 2 other projects in the works.

Carlog.io

I own the domain, but don’t know if the ruckus around .io TLDs will make me stick with it. It’s going to be a service for folks that maintain their own cars. It’ll track your gas milage, and help you maintain a car maintenance log. I really love this idea, and want to make it a free service for the fun of it, but I think its going to get overshadowed by…

Yet to be named adoption fundraising site

The project itself is spawned out of necessity. My wife and I want to adopt a child. And if you are in the US and want to adopt a child, unless you foster, you can expect to pay as much as (or more than) $50,000 US dollars. A lot of people use fundraising sites, such as Gofundme or AdoptTogether to help raise funds, but I want something a bit different. I want to make the fundraising process a bit more fun. You see, places like Altogether or GoFundMe aren’t gameified enough, they play it straight. I want reward tiers, I want to send you a tee-shirt that says “I helped Matt and Tiff buy a Kid!” or something jovial, and a little bit silly in the process of fundraising. My friend Curtis suggested the name “Make Our Village” which I like quite a lot, cause it does take a village to raise a child. So I found Harambee and will be vetting it, making sure its up to snuff to my coding standards, and then will be forking, updating, and honing it to my desires for this platform. Unlike Carlog.io, this will be completely open source, and I will be very loud when it looks like it may be done. My hope and goal is to use this myself, and also make it a proper 501(c)(3) so any donations made will be tax deductible. That’s the goal anyway. If you have any knowledge in that and like the idea reach out at my email!

So here we are

I am unsure how often I’ll be able to blog. I really want to focus on things that are valuable in blogging, and to be honest I’m not even sure if this blog is valuable enough. But introductions are important. Consider this my Invocation of beginnings, a new era in my online life. My pencils are sharp enough, even the dullest ones will make a mark.

(EDIT: Turns out its “lede” not “lead”)