Matheus Duncan

About Me

Hi, I'm Matheus! I'm a Canadian software developer working on the development of Full-Stack web applications. I've been writing code since grade school (shoutout Adobe DreamWeaver) and graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2024. I'm most interested in working on - and learning more about - non-procedural programming languages (Lisp, Prolog, etc.), devX, and writing testable systems.

Currently, I'm working at Co-Operators developing websites and applications using the MERN (Mongo, Express, React, Node) stack. Most of my time is spent building internal tools and sites to help streamline business and technical processes.

My career as a Software Developer started at Co-Operators, where I worked as an intern during university. I spent most of this time working on enterprise-scale Object-Oriented software, focusing on development and testing. If you want to know more about my work experience, checkout out my Timeline or download my Resume.

I spend my time away from the computer playing tennis, hiking, and reading history (my minor in university). I tinker on projects as well (this site is a good example of that!) but enjoy reading technical blogs and textbooks more. I'm always looking for book recommendations, so please connect with me if you have any!

During university, I worked on building small open-source projects for local non-profits. The most comprehensive of these was Pronunciation Practice. This was a greenfield web app built for IlmHub, an Edmonton educational non-profit. It allows students to practice their Arabic reading and pronunciation skills from home using lessons assigned by their instructor. My team of 5 built this project in just 4 months and successfully deployed it to cloud, where it's been used since to help educate >500 students every year.

This Site

This site was built to give me a place to share some info about myself and explore new technologies. My previous personal site was built with React and was beginning to lose performance due to typical React Bloat. I decided to do a rewrite using a simpler stack - HTML/CSS, HTMX, and Flask - to simplify the system and allow for more tinkering as well. It also allows me to move away from the React Single Page Application format and towards a more 'traditional' site design (which IMO suits personal sites better).

Everything is containerized using Docker and Docker Compose and deployed on my personal home server as an additional exercise in deploying web applications. In this site's current form, this is fairly simple, but I plan on adding some backend features that will require more intense containerization.

I wanted to try building a modern site without using JavaScript as an exercise in moving away from traditional technologies. This site uses HTMX and flask as a simple web server to deliver a true RESTful API (data sent from the server is sent as HTML, therefore being truly REpresentational). If you want to know more about HTMX, I recommend the Hypermedia Systems textbook.

Timeline

Resume

If you've made it this far (or even just clicked the 'Resume' link on the navbar), thanks for taking a look at this site! No piece of software is ever really 'done' and this site is no exception, so if you have any comments/suggestions/hatemail you can send me a message.

If you want to take a look at my resume and reach out, you can download it here in .pdf format:
Matheus Duncan Resume

Lastly, if you're looking for something to read, check out my blog (I mostly do project retrospectives and some tutorials). If you're looking for something high-quality to read, checkout out my bookshelf where I upload and review my recently-read books.

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