Matt D.

Contract Software Engineer

Apogee

I founded Apogee to provide software development & consulting services, delivering technical delivery for clients with a particular focus on functional programming, challenging problems, and embracing the advantages of remote working.

Founder & CEO

NEUROTIC

An engagement with a tech consultancy client, developing a scalable & fault-tolerant social network for their client in the recruitment industry.

Senior Software Developer

Track24

A contract engagement with a client in the 3D messaging space, delivering geocontextual messaging functionality on an application for use in mission critical environments.

A contractual engagement with a client in the medical science community, consulting on and delivering an open-source platform for scientists to collaborate on research.

My work has primarily focused around moving away from a legacy content management system to Contentful, but has also involved BAU/bug fixes and feature work on the core platform.

Software Consultant

Slerp

A permanent back-end role working to automate food ordering & delivery for white-label clients including globally known brands.

My work was primarily a complete rewrite of the scheduling system, enabling Slerp's customers to schedule opening hours with breaks (for example, lunch breaks), opening hours extending beyond midnight, and more flexible schedules on special dates (for example, bank holidays).

Senior Elixir Engineer

Evari

A permanent role in insurtech working with TypeScript & AWS services to deliver insurance-as-a-service to providers.

Duties included a complete rework of the templating system, and significant work on the rendering engine and quotations module.

Senior TypeScript Engineer

A short-term contract working for a telecommunications client based in the United States on a time-sensitive and mission critical piece of work to scale their contact management system.

Senior Software Engineer (Ctr)

Red Badger

A consulting role working with a government agency & fortune 500 financial sector companies. This role involved working on the API & Android front-end of a now-ubiquitous money transfer application, as well as implementing an open source medicinal information portal.

Senior Software Consultant Engineer

Nested.com

A short-term role with a data-driven estate agency implementing a new viewings system to automate client & agent reminders as well as collect & evaluate feedback, as well as an audit trail system recording every data change for regulatory compliance.

Software Engineer IC3 (Senior)

WorldFirst

Upskilled as part of WorldFirst's transition from PHP to Java. Projects worked on include compliance & KYC system, as well as implementing single sign on (SSO) for existing services.

Senior Java Developer

Worked both on the Platform team which was responsible for improving performance on our legacy application, and on a complete excision & rewrite of the core money tracking system.

Senior PHP Developer

Worked on a mission-critical piece of money-tracking software which used a hexagonal architecture, as well as implementing an asymmetric queue system with an integrated dead letter queue and migrating existing cron jobs.

PHP Developer

Highly motivated engineer with over 10 years of experience building fault-tolerant, scalable, maintainable APIs & services. Engaged with a range of clients & assignments from start-ups all the way up to scale-up fintechs and HM Government.

Worked commercially with the Elixir/BEAM ecosystem, Python, TypeScript & NodeJS, PHP/Symfony, Rust & Kotlin; as well as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Built complex software outside of commercial engagements with Clojure, Haskell, and Ruby, and Perl.

Familiar with functional & OOP best practices, and value idiomatic, easy-to-reason-about, tested & verified, clean code. Experienced in highly regulated industries including health, banking, insurance, dangerous environments and property.

🦀 Rustaceans keep claiming C-like performance.

When FFmpeg tried comparing a port of VideoLAN's dav1d AV1 decoder in Rust, though, they found something else.

The Rust implementation was 35% slower in multithreaded workloads than the C reference implementation. 😱

This despite the fact that most of the hot path is ASM, copied directly from the dav1d project.

⚡ When dealing with audio-visual workloads, speed is everything. These decoders need to be able to run in real-time to avoid buffering or glitches.

Prossimo are currently offering a $20,000 bounty for anyone who can make rav1d as fast as dav1d. As yet, the bounty remains unclaimed.

💬 If Rust can’t match C even with hand-written ASM in the hot path, can it ever?

#BuildInPublic #Rust #RustLang #C #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

Christian | Freelance Programmer | C, Elixir, Ruby, TypeScript, React

Tweet from ffmpeg suggesting that dav1d is 35% slower in Rust.

🕰️ 100 days out of contract, and it's really been brutal.

I don't often post about this sort of stuff, I find it depressing to talk about, and honestly I think there's enough doom and gloom on the timeline.

In the past 100 days I've:

- Accepted an offer, then had it rescinded two days before the start date because they found someone cheaper;
- Been through a multi-stage interview process with a take-home task, then been told the budget really doesn't allow for contractors;
- Been ghosted by more than 80% of the companies I've applied to (including recruitment agencies);
- Burned through the vast majority of my savings.

It's not just that there's a lot of competition out there, it's that a lot of people just seem to have forgotten basic prudence & respect.

On the other hand, I've also:

- Built an entire LLM inferencing stack in Raku
- Written a C ABI wrapper for Huggingface Tokenizers
- Played around with Simplex & Perlin noise
- Spruced up my GitHub

So it hasn't been a complete waste of time.

If you're looking for a good software engineer who just wants to build & is comfortable across various programming languages / databases / paradigms, or know anyone who is, please reach out.

#SoftwareEngineering #OutsideIR35 #ThisJobsMarket #BuildInPublic

💬 "It's not smart, look at this bad image it generated!"

This seems to be the new go-to argument against LLM intelligence: 

1. ask an LLM to draw an A-Z picture book, a map or an anatomical diagram
2. then use its failure as 'proof' that the underlying language model isn't smart.

🖼️ There's only one problem with it: LLMs generate text, not images.

What's actually happening behind the curtain is that the LLM is generating a prompt and passing it to an entirely separate image generation model.

So, you're not actually testing whether GPT5 or Grok has the intelligence to label where the lungs are, or can match words to starting letters.

📋 You're testing DALL-E or FLUX, and modern image generators are designed to generate art, not accurate diagrams.

It's great for LinkedIn engagement bait, not so great for finding the limits of large language models.

#LLMs #LargeLanguageModels #AI #ImageGeneration #AGI

💬 "There's no reason to choose C++ for a new project in 2025."

I see this kind of statement all the time, usually from Rust developers, but it couldn't be further from the truth.

Here are some great reasons to choose C++ for your next big project:

🧔 It has a vast talent pool.
20% of developers in the StackOverflow survey actively use C++, compared to 6% for Rust. The gap between the numbers who use the respective languages for commerce is much greater.

🧬 It has a great ecosystem.
Whatever you need to do, there's probably a mature, battle-tested C++ library out there to do it.

🧰 It has brilliant tooling.
Testing, SAST, DAST, sanitisers, fuzzers, model checkers, profilers, linters, build systems... C++ has some of the best tooling on the planet.

🦺 It's safer than you think (if you use modern C++).
Smart pointers & RAII prevent entire classes of bugs, built-in data structures automatically handle bounds checking & termination.

🧠 It has good metaprogramming.
Yes, C++ templates can be hard to learn and understand, but they enable things that the vast majority of other languages just can't do.

🤖 LLMs understand it.
There's a lot of C++ in the datasets because it's one of the most popular languages, and that means your AI plugin will find it easier to work with than more niche languages.

C++ isn't perfect, sure, but there are a lot of reasons to choose it where performance and predictability matter.

👇 What do you think? Would you start a new project with C++?

#BuildInPublic #SoftwareEngineering #Cplusplus #Programming #SystemsProgramming

⚠️ In most programming tasks, you end up with a lot of code like:

if ($baz) {
    $foo = "bar";
}

🐪 In Perl & Raku, there's an additional 'if' syntax that looks like this:

# $foo will equal "bar" only if $baz is truthy.
$foo = "bar" if ($baz);

We also have 'unless', so instead of 'if (!$baz)' you can do:

fail '$baz is not set.' unless ($baz);  

📃 I'm not sure why, but I find this very easy to read. I think it's probably because it reads the way we talk.

Larry Wall (the creator of Perl) is a linguist by training, so a lot of Perl's idioms are about trying to make it 'sound' more like a natural language.

💬 Have you ever used a postfix if/unless? Are they more or less readable to you?

#BuildInPublic #Perl #Raku #PostfixIf #SoftwareDevelopment

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