I had to move this site to a different domain, freenom who I have to thank for mattous.tk seems to have had some trouble lately. I can’t complain really since I had it for free since March 2015. So I’ve moved the site to mattous.co.uk.

You don’t work somewhere for 14 years without it having a big impact on you. Christians Against Poverty (CAP) has been my employer for 14 years, that’s 35% of my life.

Looking back on 14 years at CAP. I’ve learned a lot… I started out as a 1st line IT support technician, then became a PHP systems developer somehow. I then went back to Operations as a Senior IT Specialist, which eventually put me at the top of a pretty shot list of IT operations staff, having to find the answer to all the questions no one else could. Then being moved into a Senior DevOps role, which was essentially the same as before except I was in a different team but with maybe more of a dev focus doing auto deployments/docker etc.

This year has been a difficult one, work has been rough, with redundancies looming over everything right from the start of the year, good friends losing their jobs, and many good people choosing to move on. I managed to completely avoid the redundancy process, though it did come with a lot of change. The IT Ops team I was in was disbanded and I was moved into a DevOps role in a dev team, which has been good but at times I’ve felt like not a lot has really changed other than my job title. I’ve learned a lot though and with the long term prospects of work looking like they were going to be very Salesforce focused, with the next 2-3 years moving towards retiring almost all our linux systems. I decided to start applying for jobs in the summer.

This last year has been a significant one. Perhaps the biggest thing for me, and for my family, is we haven’t had any major DIY projects. Sure there’s been a few bit done, but nothing involving time off work or rooms out of action. It’s the first year since we got married that I can say that.

My son started school, and he’s been loving it. That’s been a big adjustment for the family. No more freedom to choose when we go on holiday. He has settled into school life well. Our daughter has missed him but is also learning to find her own way when he’s not around. My wife has also found it hard not having him around, but her life is a little easier because she only has one child to look after for 6 hours of the day.

When I was a teenager me and some friends were obsessed with Sonic. We would play Sonic games in the woods & in the playground a school, we were not cool. We even designed levels and came up with new characters for games we hoped we might one day make.

Skip forward some 30 years and I find myself with time and some skills in programming, so I’m going to have a stab at game development. I won’t be making Sonic games, but I’m going to learn what I can. I’ve been working through some tutorials and getting started with the basics. It’s not like anything I’ve done before and I’m excited to write about what I learn along the way. I hope as my kids grow, it will be fun to make games with them. I have no illusions of ever making any money from this hobby. It’s purely a way to learn something new and have some fun along the way.

💥 Coming soon!