PLAYER ONE / MATT RILEY

A small world.
A lot of work.

I build backend systems and developer tools.
This is a little world of the things I've made
and the places I've worked.

Prefer a good old website? Read the portfolio

01 / THE TOOL SHED

Things I've made.

Personal tools. Public source.
Built around real uses.

Waffle, imagined as a small orange terminal with a keyboard and green screen in Blender

01 / Go

Run an agent.

Waffle

A personal AI agent that runs on your own hardware.

A place to bring models, skills, and tools together around the way I work. The terminal in the film represents the agent you use.

Explore Waffle

AgenGit, imagined as a blue reel-to-reel recorder with aluminium reels and a recording light in Blender

02 / Zig

Keep the record.

AgenGit

A local record of what coding agents do between Git commits.

Commits tell one part of the story. AgenGit captures the activity between them. The tape recorder represents that running record.

Explore AgenGit

Lore, imagined as a blue archive drawer filled with tabbed index cards in Blender

03 / JavaScript / SQLite

Remember context.

Lore

Local memory for Copilot CLI and Pi, stored in SQLite.

Context that can carry over to the next session. The card archive represents memory you keep locally.

Explore Lore

Waffle, the orange cat the agent is named after

The other Waffle.
The cat came first. The agent borrowed the name.

GO / EVALUATION

skill-eval

Run the same task with and without a skill, grade the outputs, and measure the difference.

LUA / NEOVIM

pint.nvim

A small measure of UI for Neovim — dashboards, notifications, statuscolumn, indent guides, and reference words.

GO / FEATURE FLAGS

Flagz

A self-hosted feature-flag service with REST, gRPC, SSE, PostgreSQL, and Go and TypeScript clients.

02 / THE WORK DISTRICT

Places I've worked.

Read the plain-text work record

I started in analysis and testing, then moved through backend, platform, and product engineering. Same questions each time: does it ship, does it stay up, and is the next change cheaper than the last?

jan 2026 — nowLloyds WealthSenior Software Engineer
I work on the existing TypeScript suite — React, Remix, and Serverless on AWS SAM. Since joining I've moved several repos from CircleCI to GitHub Actions, put infrastructure in Terraform, and been chipping away at dependency and platform updates so the next change is cheaper.
- TypeScript
- React
- Remix
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions
- AWS SAM
- AWS
feb 2023 — sep 2023HavenSenior Software Engineer
Web Platform and Activities. I built API layers over the existing databases and simplified the backend so the product teams weren't fighting the architecture to ship.
- AWS
- Express
- Fastify
- Kubernetes
- NestJS
- NodeJS
- PostgreSQL
- Terraform
- TypeScript
nov 2021 — dec 2022Add To EventSoftware Engineer
I helped move the product off Drupal onto TypeScript microservices on GKE, using NestJS. Same product, new backend.
- Cloud Functions
- Docker
- GCP
- Gitlab
- Kubernetes
- NestJS
- NodeJS
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Terraform
- TypeScript
jul 2019 — jul 2021MetriskSoftware Engineer
I built the service behind Scan2Recycle: users photograph a product, Cloud Vision identifies it, and they get a reward — store loyalty points, for example — for putting it in an in-store recycle bin.
That service ran on GCP (Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Cloud Vision). The main Metrisk promotions platform was AWS — AppSync, Lambda, Serverless.
- AWS
- Cloud Functions
- DynamoDB
- GCP
- Github Actions
- GraphQL
- Kinesis
- Lambda
- NodeJS
- PubSub
- Serverless
- TypeScript
apr 2015 — jul 2019SkySoftware Engineer
I joined as an automation tester and moved onto the GraphQL core team. That service fed Sky.com and the MySky app. I also looked after the Varnish cache in front of the backends GraphQL consumed.
- Apollo Server
- Docker
- Express
- Grafana
- GraphQL
- Kafka
- MongoDB
- NodeJS
- Redis
- Ruby
- Sinatra
apr 2014 — apr 2015William HillTest Engineer
Testing gaming content on William Hill — mainly Vegas, plus Games and Live Casino. Fairness testing on an in-house Node.js app, supplier REST APIs, and some Ruby automation with the Innovation team.
- Coffeescript
- MongoDB
- NodeJS
- Ruby
jan 2012 — apr 2014Hewlett PackardSystem Integration Test Engineer
- Citrix
- Ruby
nov 2007 — dec 2011DWPBusiness Analyst & Test Engineer
- Excel
- Microsoft Access
- Oracle e-business suite
- Visual Basic

03 / MEET THE LOCAL

The person
behind the pixels.

Senior software engineer in Leeds. Products, APIs, and developer tools that have to keep working.

I've spent nearly twenty years in software, mostly on backend APIs and the systems around them — GraphQL at Sky, product and platform work after that, currently at Lloyds Wealth. I also make tools for my own setup: a personal agent, a way to record what coding agents do between commits, and a pile of Neovim and Homebrew bits.

I'm a Neovim user, which I have to mention at any possible opportunity as per the terms and conditions of using (Neo)Vim, and comfortable using any environment with a terminal — preferably macOS or (almost) any flavour of Linux.

Outside of writing code and tinkering with my dotfiles I enjoy:

(mostly 80s/90s) hip-hop
Supporting Everton FC (although 'enjoy' may be an exaggeration here)
Gaming — Dead by Daylight, Spider-Man, GTA being my main go-tos
Drinking craft beers — mainly stouts and DIPAs from The Hoptimist

FROM THE PAID WORK

NodeJS
TypeScript
AWS
Ruby
Terraform
Cloud Functions
Docker
Express

05 / THE SOURCE ARCHIVE

Made to
be used.

I build backend systems and developer tools, from first release through the work of keeping them running.

Explore the work

Objects of the work / 001A Blender study

Three independent tools, imagined as objects on a workbench.12 seconds / three chapters

01 WaffleRun an agent.

02 AgenGitKeep the record.

03 LoreRemember context.