About
$ cat /etc/matt.conf
ROLE="Software Architect"
LOCATION="Birmingham, AL"
ONLINE_SINCE="~1994"
CURRENT_OBSESSION="AI Agents"
FIRST_MODEM="14.4Kbps"
STATUS="Building things"I'm Matt Ezell — a software architect and lifelong technologist from Birmingham, Alabama. I've been building things with computers for over 30 years, and I still get the same buzz from a new technology that I got when I first connected to a BBS over a 14.4k modem from my parents' house in Troy, Alabama.
The Origin Story
It started the way it did for a lot of kids born in the 80s — a NES under the Christmas tree, sneaking out of bed to play Mario with the volume all the way down, praying my parents wouldn't catch me before I finished the next stage. Then our family got a PC — a 66MHz AST beige box — and I discovered that getting DOOM to run required learning about memory management and boot disks. I was twelve, and I was hooked.
I installed our first modem myself after my dad didn't get to it fast enough (I gave him about 24 hours, in the middle of the work week — generous, I thought). From there it was BBS boards in the evenings when calling rates were cheaper, then an anonymous SLIP account on a free NASA dial-up line to reach the actual Internet. I remember searching Webcrawler through a text interface, memorizing search keywords, and thinking: this is going to be really, really big.
The Career
I taught myself HTML by viewing source on websites in the mid-90s, built PCs, ran home networks, and made extra cash cleaning viruses off the laptops of Troy State University students. College started as IT/networking, took a detour through Cellular Molecular Biology, and landed on Computer Science.
For years I worked IT support and help desk jobs — the kind where most people ask "did you try turning it off and on again?" while I was using SysInternals tools to actually diagnose the problem, secretly working through Python tutorials in between calls, trying to understand more. I kept making friends with the dev teams and eventually, around 27, some guys at a local software company took a chance on me and let me write code for a living.
Now 45, I've been in the industry for well over 20 years. I've worked across the full stack, led teams, architected enterprise systems in fintech, and contributed to open source along the way. The technologies change, but the thing that drives me hasn't — I just want to understand how things work, and then build something with that understanding.
Right Now
The emergence of AI and agentic systems has me feeling the same way I felt when I first discovered the Internet. I'm building TaskSmith — an open source agent orchestration layer for Claude Code — and running The New Guard, an AI intelligence briefing for builders. Oh, yeah - and 🦀 ALL THE CLAWS 🦞 an experiment in building AI agents in OpenClaw.
I'm also exploring the AI consulting space, helping teams and organizations make sense of what's actually possible (and what isn't) with the current generation of AI tooling.