mattjcowan

Hey, I'm Matt.

I've spent 25+ years in the trenches of enterprise software — federal agencies, manufacturing, scientific organizations, and everything in between. I run MJCZone Inc., a consulting firm where I help organizations solve hard technical problems with clean, maintainable solutions.

My go-to day-to-day stack is .NET/C#, Vue/Nuxt, PostgreSQL, S3, Redis, WS/SSE, and Cloudflare, self-hosted on Vultr or Hetzner.

In recent years, I've had the pleasure of working with some great organizations, and led the development of:

• NERDE/NERRAA at Argonne National Laboratory giving Data Analysts and ML Engineers the ability to surface their research on the web in a completely custom no-code platform.
• Data and Training Analytics platforms for FEMA.
• An array of software applications for Emergency Management groups across the country.
• Native mobile conference applications for associations.
• Serial port drivers and integrations for some hardware peripheral companies.

I thrive on projects where the tech is unfamiliar, the problems are real and challenging, and I can come in, learn quickly, lead the design, and deliver an innovative solution that meets all stakeholder needs, often above and beyond expectations.

Outside the billable work, if I'm not spending time with my family or working on projects around the house, I work on passion projects: Swingsei for systematic swing trading and intraday futures trading, Teach Classical for families pursuing Classical Christian Education (CCE), SuperSimpleWeb — an AI-native web builder I've been incubating for a while, and Col 2:8 resources for studying scripture.

Faith is foundational for me, not something I compartmentilize. Colossians 2:8 is the operating verse for a lot of how I think about technology, education, and culture. I'm married to Kristina, an author whose writing on faith and motherhood has its own reach. We have a son and a daughter in High School, or Rhetoric (in CCE terminology).

Background

I was born and grew up in France with American parents, the third child in a family of four children. I moved around quite a bit growing up, every couple years. We made our final voyage to the United States when I was 16 to Northern Virginia.

I attended University of Virginia as an undergrad. I graduated with a double major in Physics and Anthropology.

A few years after graduating college, I received an MBA from Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business.

My career started in manufacturing at Kwikset (a Black & Decker company), teaching myself to code, and building integrations between CAD systems, ERP systems and manufacturing plant routing systems. After a couple years, I moved into working with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems and learning all about consulting and enterprise software project implementations. I eventually progressed into a series of career transitions in the vast world of Software Engineering spanning the country coast to coast, and eventually formed my company MJCZone Inc. by request from my largest client. In 2023, our family moved to Tulsa, OK.

Open Source

I maintain DapperMatic — an open-source DDL/DML abstraction library for .NET, relicensed to LGPL-3.0. It's used in many of my personal and commercial projects and available on GitHub at https://github.com/mjczone/dappermatic. If you work with .NET and Databases and need portable schema management, give it a look.