https://ooo-yay.com Personal website and blog of Matt - thoughts, projects, and insights en-us Sat, 16 May 2026 20:53:18 GMT https://ooo-yay.com/blog/engineering-culture-matters-more-than-ever https://ooo-yay.com/blog/engineering-culture-matters-more-than-ever The industry has spent a decade recoiling into rigidity and pessimism, and the AI moment is reproducing the same false dichotomies. A case for returning to curiosity, experimentation, and the willingness to be wrong. Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT matt cultureaiindustry https://ooo-yay.com/blog/warrant-a-shared-work-queue-for-agents-and-humans https://ooo-yay.com/blog/warrant-a-shared-work-queue-for-agents-and-humans Warrant is a work queue plus shared project context so people and IDE agents can pull tickets, log work, and hand off to human review, without losing the thread between chat and the repo. Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT matt aiagentstoolswarrant https://ooo-yay.com/blog/ai-is-automation https://ooo-yay.com/blog/ai-is-automation AI is automation and no matter how good the model you cannot automate things you do not understand. Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT matt aiproductivityprogramming https://ooo-yay.com/blog/i-made-my-own-irc-client https://ooo-yay.com/blog/i-made-my-own-irc-client Yes, it is still 2026 and you read that title correctly. I built an IRC client. Slack, Discord, and Matrix all still exist. But here we are. I made an IRC client, and I'm going to tell you about it. Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT matt ircdevelopmenttoolsgowails https://ooo-yay.com/blog/how-i-design-systems https://ooo-yay.com/blog/how-i-design-systems A practical guide to designing distributed systems by breaking them down into functional areas: architecture, communication, ingress, events, databases, caching, testing, and instrumentation. Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt systemsarchitectureengineeringdistributed-systemssoftware-engineering https://ooo-yay.com/blog/introducing-lan-events https://ooo-yay.com/blog/introducing-lan-events I've been working on [lan.events](https://beta.lan.events), a platform for organizing and discovering LAN parties and gaming events. I started going to LAN parties as a kid, took a long break as a young adult, then got back into it in 2025 thanks to my friend Ben. We hit DreamHack together, which led me to PDXLAN in the fall. Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt lan.eventsprojectsgaming https://ooo-yay.com/blog/building-my-own-personal-assistant https://ooo-yay.com/blog/building-my-own-personal-assistant I'm building my own personal assistant to help me with my daily tasks. Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt projectsaipersonal-assistantorbitassist.ai https://ooo-yay.com/blog/open-source-and-monetization https://ooo-yay.com/blog/open-source-and-monetization I've been publishing HashPost's code publicly since its inception but it's not actually open source. Recently I've been thinking about what the pros and cons of open sourcing are as well as how HashPost will sustain itself. Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt hashpostopen source https://ooo-yay.com/blog/back-to-a-static-site https://ooo-yay.com/blog/back-to-a-static-site After a year and a half of my blog being a dynamic site I'm going back to a static site. Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt aiprogramminghashpost https://ooo-yay.com/blog/migrating-to-ssr-and-source-availability https://ooo-yay.com/blog/migrating-to-ssr-and-source-availability My blog is actually two applications: a frontend and a backend. The frontend used to be a client side rendered (CSR) application, which worked fine for my usual work on internal tools. Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/reliability-as-a-profit-center https://ooo-yay.com/blog/reliability-as-a-profit-center Prologue I'll be frank — I've spent most my career building reliability into products and businesses. I've never considered it a feature that's for sale. Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/building-my-own-markdown-editor https://ooo-yay.com/blog/building-my-own-markdown-editor Since I started this blog project I've been using a Markdown based WYSIWYG editor. I necessarily had to pick a new framework when I migrated to Vue. Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/somewhere https://ooo-yay.com/blog/somewhere You might hear the wind make up stories. Acorns dream of growing tall. Leaves don't ask before they fall. Light finds its way between the trees. Dew gathers without fuss. Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/2025-roadmap https://ooo-yay.com/blog/2025-roadmap My 2025 roadmap is pretty simple: - [x] Site branding - [x] JSON feed endpoint > I originally intended to publish an Atom Feed but ended up going with JSON Feed since most modern services support it. Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/using-an-llm-to-code-six-month-update https://ooo-yay.com/blog/using-an-llm-to-code-six-month-update It's been six months since I last wrote about my experience using GitHub CoPilot while I wrote this blog. If you haven't read that entry, my key takeaways were: - CoPilot functioned like a smarter... Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/server-client-wire-compatibility-guarantees https://ooo-yay.com/blog/server-client-wire-compatibility-guarantees An idea I've been proliferating recently is that, in the year of our lord 2024, server and client communication should be guaranteed to be wire-compatible. Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/defensive-programming-in-python https://ooo-yay.com/blog/defensive-programming-in-python I love Python, but it's a minefield of a language. Here's some things I do to have confidence in the code I write. Always log exceptions Exceptions are the standard path for error reporting in... Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/november-website-updates https://ooo-yay.com/blog/november-website-updates November updates are out. This is the conclusion of the major features I intended to develop initially for this blog. Below is a summary of new features and fixes. Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/ai-could-be-the-undoing-of-corporate-dominance https://ooo-yay.com/blog/ai-could-be-the-undoing-of-corporate-dominance I've been working on the comments system for my blog in the past week. Comments systems are complicated; there's not only what the user experiences but there's also entire sub-systems and metadata... Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt aiproductivityprogramming https://ooo-yay.com/blog/october-website-updates https://ooo-yay.com/blog/october-website-updates As promised in one of my earlier posts I have continued to hack on this website. The early days of this project were pretty rudimentary at best as my git history will happily attest to. Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/i-wrote-a-file-manager https://ooo-yay.com/blog/i-wrote-a-file-manager I wrote a file manager so that I could upload photos and it turned out a lot better than I expected. I ended up with this feature list: - Public files - Private files - Automated, time-based... Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/error-handling-with-openapi-generator-s-typescript-fetch-client https://ooo-yay.com/blog/error-handling-with-openapi-generator-s-typescript-fetch-client I use OpenAPI Generator's typescript-fetch client in most projects I build. For the most part, it does the job, but it wasn't super obvious how I could capture errors as part of my response. Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/using-pydantic-settings-with-django-and-django-ninja https://ooo-yay.com/blog/using-pydantic-settings-with-django-and-django-ninja I love Django as a framework. It's modularity makes building new and complex projects a breeze. When Django Ninja came around and layered Pydantic Schema onto the framework for serialization I was... Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt https://ooo-yay.com/blog/forever-projects https://ooo-yay.com/blog/forever-projects Before I was a professional programmer programming was much more of a labor of love. I built tools for IRC, mostly scripts and bots for channel management or novelty like slapping someone with... Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT matt