About matatat.org

Obviously inspired by kottke.org, matatat.org is the personal site of me, Mat Leonard. I’m a generalist mostly working on tech things. I love learning and building tools that help people. I have a particular passion for designing intuitive and beautiful Python libraries.

I read novels and short stories. Favorites include Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Borge’s Ficciones, anything written by Ursula LeGuin or Octavia Butler.

I love music: post-punk, dream pop, shoegaze, alt R&B, whatever genre Broadcast and Stereolab are. Also Destroyer and Chris Cohen and Brian Eno.

I’m taking pottery classes. I love being in nature and riding my bike around town. Pub trivia is life. I play Magic: The Gathering, mostly Commander/EDH. I’m playing Tears of the Kingdom currently, with Diablo 4 coming out in a few days.

I cook most days, exclusively vegetarian, often Mexican. I make a pretty good mole sauce. I love baking banana bread.

Check out my wife’s work, she’s a brilliant cartoonist.

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Professionally

Most recently – Generalist engineer at Bardeen
Previously – Education Program Lead at OpenMined
Before that – Senior AI Engineer at Augustus Intelligence
And before that – Instructional Designer at Kaggle
Some time ago – Product Lead and Content Developer at Udacity
Ages beyond – PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley (Experimental Neuroscience - Electrophysiology)