About
Two countries, one long apprenticeship.
I'm Matt. I grew up in Iran, I live in Sydney, I've been writing software for about twenty years, and most of what I know about building things I learned by having to start over.
Beginnings
It started with a mathematics olympiad in my second year of high school. I'd never done maths for marks — I did it because solving something was its own reward. The olympiad was simply where that got to be the point.
That's where I met Pascal, and programming turned out to be the same joy with a machine to argue back. Write something, be wrong, find out exactly why, write it again. Twenty years later that loop is still the whole job. The languages changed. The loop never did.
Iran → Australia
I moved from Iran to Australia in 2013, with a laptop and a résumé nobody here had heard of. Emigrating teaches you things a career can't: how to be a beginner in public, how to read a room in your second language, and how much of what looks like competence is really just refusing to stop.
Sydney is home now. My kids are growing up here, and the two halves of that — where I'm from and where they're from — sit side by side in this house more easily than I expected.
Starting over in a new country was the best engineering education I ever had. Nothing teaches you to ship like having no safety net.
Work & ventures
Most of my career has been spent as a hands-on tech lead — Westpac, QBE, THE ICONIC — the person who writes the code and also has to answer for the architecture six months later.
Since 2020 I've been building Testfully, a bootstrapped API development toolkit in a category with very well-funded competition. No runway to buy attention with — so the strategy is the unglamorous one: listen closely, ship small, keep iterating, and let the product get better every week for years.
Alongside it I contract — still hands-on, still in the codebase. Titles have changed over the years; the part I've never wanted to give up is writing the software myself.
Away from the keyboard
- Photography
- I shoot because it makes me slow down and look properly at a place I'd otherwise walk straight through. Streets, light, my family. Nothing ambitious — just attention.
- Travel
- The other half of the same habit. I like the disorientation of the first day somewhere new, when you can't read anything and have to pay attention to everything.
- Football
- Most weekends involve a football and my son. He's faster than me now, and he brings it up.
If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, I'd like to hear from you.