Hey there, I'm Matt Eden and I work as a computer engineer in Auckland, New Zealand. I created this website to make it easier for interested people to learn a little bit about me and, just as importantly, check out some of my awesome work.
Who am I?
I'm just someone who likes computers. It's sort of hard to imagine myself without one, to be honest. Over time, electronic devices have embedded themselves into seemingly every aspect of our lives and uplifted our day-to-day activities. As a result of that, I love learning about them.
What do I do?
Truth be told, I dabble in a little bit of everything. Whether it's writing low-level C for embedded contexts, throwing together enough TypeScript to get a website running, spinning up Docker instances to host local databases, configuring a Linux server to act as a private cloud or wrangling with AWS for a corporate cloud... I've probably done it. Or tried to, at least.
Work
Current Projects
Past Projects
Contact
Outerstellar
Outerstellar is a top-down arcade space shooter which sees the player traverse through multiple levels and attempt to survive various waves of enemies. Throughout the game, the player collects coins from enemies they have defeated which they can use to upgrade their ship's health, weapons and shields. By prioritising the correct upgrades, moving quickly and persevering through hordes of the enemies, the player will make it to the final level where they must face one last enemy before declaring themselves victorious. Created in GameMaker Studio during an Arcade Games Hackathon. Won 2nd place.
Energize is a side-scrolling action adventure game that follows you, the hero, as you traverse a randomly-generated dungeon in your quest to defeat the "big bad evil guy" waiting for you at the end. Find items along the way to help you in your quest, or bring along a friend to watch your back and help you cut down the enemies that stand in your way. Created in Java 11 using the JavaFX library. Features:
Roll for Reaction is a top-down action adventure RPG which enables you, as the player, to explore a set of dungeons, collecting the items and abilities required to defeat the enemies you encounter along the way. Loosely based on the real-world tabletop RPG Dungeons and Dragons and forked from a pre-existing open-source project, the game is lots of fun and endlessly replayable. Created with React and Redux. Features:
Point-based ability scores that determine player stats
Character progression through randomly-generated items found throughout levels
This website, and all of the websites using the matteden.nz or matteas.nz domains, are hosted out of my personal Kubernetes instance running on a physical server with 99% uptime. The server itself runs Proxmox, with Kubernetes installed in a container. Each website is itself contained within an Nginx pod, with Traefik being used as the reverse-proxy. ArgoCD is used for syncing application manifests between Kubernetes and a private repository on Github, which means that it's easy to spin up new applications and rollback manifests when needed.
Application repositories, such as the individual websites, make use of a CI pipeline that is triggered on a push to the master branch. From this, an event is sent to the manifest repository, which triggers ArgoCD to deploy the restart the deployment containers and pull down the latest version of the source. All of this is managed via Github Actions and Workflows.
JuniorDev Meetup Talk
In October of 2024, I was graciously invited to give a talk at the JuniorDev Auckland Meetup. Here's the description from the meetup page:
Talk 1: Lessons I've Learnt in Reducing Friction: Why Intentional Communication Matters
Over the past year, I've had a lot of opportunities to make an impact in various parts of my organisation. With each opportunity came a new set of lessons; ways that I messed up that I could learn from. I got a lot of feedback from lots of people, and the one thing I focused on which really turned everything around was my communication. By being more intentional with my communication, I earned people's trust, became more productive, and reduced a lot of friction that had surrounded my work. Now I'd like to share what I've learned so that we can all level up the way we communicate and work together.
