Dream in Hex is where I write about software, architecture, security, AI, cloud infrastructure, and whatever technical problem has managed to get stuck in my head that week.
I'm Matthew Martin, though a lot of people know me as Doc. The nickname came from friends in the Navy. I wore Doc Martens constantly, my last name is Martin, and my father was an Air Force veteran with a PhD, so there were enough bad jokes available that "Doc" eventually became permanent.
I'm a Software Architect and Full Stack Engineer with more than two decades of experience building software across finance, healthcare, logistics, e-commerce, and a few other industries along the way. I've worked everywhere from startups to Fortune 100 companies, designing systems, writing production code, leading engineering efforts, and helping teams figure out how to build complicated things without making them unnecessarily complicated.
Most of my work today lives somewhere around AWS, .NET, TypeScript, React, APIs, distributed systems, and cloud architecture. I've spent a lot of time with microservices, event-driven systems, security, data, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and the collection of interesting problems that appear once software has to survive contact with the real world.
I still write code. That's important to me.
I've never been particularly interested in separating architecture from engineering. Good architecture should survive implementation, and the person drawing the boxes should understand what happens when somebody has to turn those boxes into working software. I like moving between application code, infrastructure, APIs, data, frontend work, debugging, performance problems, and system design.
AI has become a significant part of that work. I'm interested in practical AI engineering, not just adding a chatbot to something and calling it a strategy. I use multiple models as development and reasoning tools, often having them challenge each other's output, review code, explore architectural options, and help accelerate work while keeping a human firmly in the loop. I'm particularly interested in what happens when AI becomes part of the engineering process itself, from development workflows to security, architecture, and the way we design software.
I've also spent a fair amount of time speaking about technology. I've presented at events including Elastic{ON}, Code on the Beach, and Fintech Devcon, where I've been a featured speaker twice. I enjoy talking about the parts of engineering that are actually difficult: tradeoffs, security, architecture, scale, and the gap between what looks good on a diagram and what works in production.
Dream in Hex grew out of the same tendency that drives most of what I do: I like making things.
Sometimes that's software. Sometimes it's music. I'm a songwriter, vocalist, and musician, and music is a large part of my life outside of engineering.
I'm also a bladesmith. I had the opportunity to compete on History Channel's Forged in Fire, appearing in Season 10, Episode 24. Bladesmithing scratches a surprisingly similar itch to engineering. Design something, understand the materials, make decisions, screw something up, fix it, and eventually end up with something that works.
Some articles here come from problems I've encountered professionally. Others come from experiments, side projects, security questions, AI, music technology, strange ideas, or something I wanted to understand well enough to explain to someone else.
I've written and spoken about subjects including cloud architecture, analytics, encoding, passwords, application security, software design, and the growing role of AI in engineering.
I spent part of my younger life in the U.S. Navy, and that experience probably has more influence on how I approach engineering than I usually admit. I value people who know their craft, teams that can depend on one another, and solutions that actually work when conditions aren't ideal.
Mostly, I like building things, breaking things, figuring out why they broke, and occasionally writing down what I learned.
That's Dream in Hex.