Matt Reed
Welcome to my web page. It’s a work in progress. I hope that whatever it is you are looking for--even if it’s just grammatical mistakes--you are able to find.
Best,
Now
Here’s what’s currently capturing my interest:
- Running: Doing a Half-marathon later in October. Will hopefully get back into Triathlons in 2026.
- Hardware: Vibing some hardware projects. Physical agent interfaces. Retro-futuristic printers. ePaper sculptures. And so on. I’ve got a lot to learn.
- Mobile User Experience: Learning iOS design.
- AI Learning: I don’t think the word Artificial is bad.
- New York City: Recently vacationed there as a family. My boring take: it’s a great place.
Projects
2026
A simple music and audiobook player for iPhone and Mac, synced through iCloud Drive. A throwback to simpler times before streaming and subscriptions.
2026
A small strategy game about controlling space, where you can play against an AI opponent or watch two robots compete.
2025
An audio-guided practice tool for learning to say the Lord’s Prayer in Modern Greek.
2024
A cross-stitched QR doorway into a generative digital world, made for Art All Night Pittsburgh 2024.
2022
I love the treemap visualization, but I had the idea of combining it with Brownian motion and an old forest simulation algorithm I made in grad school to give a "visceral" impression of what data means. This is a forest map of Pittsburgh forest species data.
2021
A Discord bot friend for group work sprints, encouragement, poems, and whimsy.
2017
A retro-style playground for learning programming and turtle geometry through Logo-like drawing commands based on a classic computer science text.
Favorites
Media that I return to often or that have particularly impacted my thinking:
Literature (Novels)
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice / Persuasion
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov / Crime and Punishment
- Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina / War and Peace
- Ivan Turgenev: Nest of the Gentry / Fathers and Sons
- Italo Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveler / Invisible Cities
Poetry:
- Wendell Berry: The Peace of Wild Things
- T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
- A. R. Ammons: The Very Short Poems of A. R. Ammons
- Denise Levertov: Selected Poems
- Robert Frost: Collected Poems
Short Stories
- Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
- Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard to Find
- Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
- Anton Chekhov: Collected Stories
- P. G. Wodehouse: The Inimitable Jeeves
Travel
- Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia
- Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts / Between the Woods and the Water
- Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums
- Herodotus: The Histories
- Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
- Constantine Cavarnos: Anchored in God
- Anonymous: The Way of the Pilgrim
Fantasy Novels
- Terry Pratchett: Equal Rites / Mort / Going Postal / Night Watch / The Truth
- Susanna Clarke: Piranesi
- Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit
- C. S. Lewis: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy
- Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus
- Lloyd Alexander: Taran Wanderer
- Jostein Gaarder: Sophie’s World
Sci-fi Novels
- Kurt Vonnegut: Timequake / Breakfast of Champions
- Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog
- Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries
- Iain M. Banks: Look to the Windward / The Player of Games
- Frank Herbert: Dune
- G. K. Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill
Nonfiction
- Annie Dillard: Teaching a Stone to Talk
- Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird
- Michael Pollan: The Botany of Desire / How to Change Your Mind / The Omnivore’s Dilemma
- Tracy Kidder: A Truck Full of Money / The Soul of a New Machine
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Fooled by Randomness / The Black Swan
- Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie
- Michael Lewis: The New New Thing / Liar’s Poker
- Barbara Kingsolver: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Plays
- Samuel Beckett: Endgame / Waiting for Godot
- August Wilson: The Piano Lesson
Design
- Christopher Alexander: Design Patterns / The Oregon Experiment / Timeless Way of Building
- Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto
- Dan Roam: The Back of the Napkin
- Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Cal Newport: Deep Work
Exercise / Health
- Haruki Murakami: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
- Grant Petersen: Just Ride
Religion
- Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm
- Sergei Bulgakov: The Orthodox Church
- Luke Timothy Johnson: The Experience of God in Early Christianity / Jesus and the Gospels / Teaching Company Recordings
- David Bentley Hart: Doors of the Sea / That All May Be Saved
- Desert Fathers: The Wisdom of the Desert / Early Fathers from the Philokalia
- Tito Colliander: Way of the Ascetics
- C. S. Lewis: Surprised by Joy
Photo Wall
About
I’ve travelled a good deal in Pittsburgh, PA. I bike, and run (slowly). I’ve been a swimmer, and a wanderer in the woods. As a child, I was a great catcher of frogs.
I’ve been writing code for decades, and have had an interest in data visualizations, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction since at least graduate school twenty years ago.
I like shapes. Also, colors. Patterns too. I tend toward collage, non sequitur, riddles, frivolous jokes and references, and armchair treasure hunts. When I paint watercolors, it is by luck and heaven’s favor. I still read poetry, and sometimes write it. I used to make music, and maybe I’ll make more one day. My record player is often broken. I like to cook.
I’m a husband as well as a parent of two amazing children (I don’t share about this aspect of my life on the internet). By God’s grace, I’m a Greek Orthodox Christian: by my actions, I’m kind of boring. I have a moderate liberal mind, but am conservative in temperament. I’m pro-Abundance and an AI optimist. I also like clouds.
I post random photos on Instagram, write words on X, have an obligatory LinkedIn (which I try to avoid visiting as much as possible), and I’m starting to add code to GitHub. I also create simple, useful apps at Simple Useful Apps. Feel free to connect.
Colophon
Set in Newsreader for reading and Source Sans 3 for menus, both from Google Fonts. Built with Astro, with no other front-end libraries: the carousel, photo wall and pop-ups are plain TypeScript and CSS. The palette is white paper, near-black ink (#1d1d1f) and two grays (#6e6e73 and #9a9a9f), so the Polaroids bring all the color.
The photos and words are mine. Web development by Claude. Graphic design by Codex.