about

Deterministically honest, undeterministically curious.

I'm Matt Morin, a generalist engineer who ended up specialising in making systems make more sense. I do NixOS architectures, consulting, programming work, DevOps and AI. I live for the moment when a messy pile of shell scripts, untracked config and tribal knowledge collapses into one declarative, versioned, reproducible unit.

My approach is boring on purpose: small written ADRs over big design PDFs, plain tools over clever ones, commits small enough to review over coffee. I write on this site mostly to stop answering the same questions twice — about Nix, secrets, observability, and the indoor gardening of LLM pipelines.

Off-screen I keep a homelab alive, grow real houseplants with real (dumb) sensors, and tell my microcontrollers secrets no human would tolerate.

$ history

    Independent consultant

    2024 — now

    NixOS architectures, DevOps, AI engineering — for indie hackers and small teams.

    Product engineer

    2022 — 2024

    SvelteKit/Next.js, Prisma + Postgres, payments, scraping, LLM features. Wore the ops hat as often as the dev hat.

    Self-hosted homelab

    2021 — onward

    Hetzner + self-built servers, monitoring, backups, WireGuard meshes, weird ESP32 gadgets.

$ skills --list

Infrastructure

  • NixOS fluent
  • Nix flakes fluent
  • sops-nix fluent
  • systemd fluent
  • nginx / Caddy competent
  • Garage (S3) competent

DevOps

  • Docker fluent
  • GitHub Actions fluent
  • Gitea Actions fluent
  • Grafana / Prometheus competent
  • WireGuard competent

Programming

  • TypeScript fluent
  • Svelte 5 fluent
  • SvelteKit fluent
  • Next.js fluent
  • Prisma fluent
  • Node.js fluent
  • Bash fluent
  • SQL competent
  • Python competent
  • C / C++ competent

AI

  • LLM APIs fluent
  • Zod contracts fluent
  • RAG competent
  • Local inference competent

Data

  • PostgreSQL fluent
  • SQLite fluent
  • MongoDB exploring

Cloud

  • Hetzner fluent
  • Cloudflare fluent
  • DigitalOcean fluent
  • AWS competent
  • Terraform competent

IoT

  • ESP32 fluent
  • MQTT competent
  • BLE competent
  • Raspberry Pi fluent

Design

  • Figma fluent
  • UI/UX competent
  • Inkscape competent

A = fluent, B = competent, C = exploring. Honest levels, no 9/10 studio-rating nonsense.