About
Hi, I'm Matt.
I'm a software engineer and musician in the Philadelphia area. I try my best every day, and I build things meant to keep working long after I've moved on to the next one.
Day job
Backend, cloud, and AI agents
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase, where I work on a high-volume home-loan platform. Most of my work is Java/Spring Boot microservices and Python services on AWS, with the infrastructure written in Terraform. Before that I built e-commerce systems at Qurate Retail Group and ERP software at Deacom.
The part of leading I love most is giving people the tools to help themselves. A good answer solves today's problem; a good explanation means they won't need to ask next time.
I use agentic AI development every day: writing specs, handing pieces to coding agents, and reviewing what comes back like any other pull request. This site was rebuilt that way.
AWS Certified Developer – Associate. B.S. in Computer Science from West Chester University.
Off the clock
Music
Music is a big part of my life, both playing it and listening to it. I played a lot of electric guitar growing up; these days it's mostly classical guitar, which takes patience and practice and gets more rewarding the longer you stick with it. I also play bass and synthesizers and record at home. And music is one of the best ways I know for different people to connect.
How I work
A few things I live by
- Try my best every day. Diligence beats brilliance on most days, and it adds up.
- I haven't earned it yet. That keeps me driven, and keeps me reading the docs instead of guessing.
- Everything is hardest the first time. So it all gets easier. The only way out is through.
In practice that means concentrating on what matters, staying organized, and designing for the future as far as time allows. You can see it in the projects: tests that run on every commit, a projector interlock that fails toward the cheap mistake, a commute alert that never stays silent, and sites with no build step or dependencies that can disappear out from under them.
Also
Mountains, local shows, and a Raspberry Pi
Skiing gives me a reason to get outside, exercise and explore, and I love the quiet of being on a mountain, whether I'm on my own or with friends. For live music I keep it local. Plenty of evenings go to tinkering with the Raspberry Pi that runs the house.
This site has been around since 2017. In 2026 the CDN behind its old UI framework went dark and took the whole layout with it, so I rebuilt it as plain HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript. No build step, no dependencies to vanish.
Contact
Say hi
Email is best: admin [at] mferet [dot] com. Reach out if any of my projects interest you, or if you're looking for a motivated engineer who's curious about how things work.