Matthew Lindfield Seager

About

matt17r.com is where I muse on things I am interested in. My full name is Matthew Lindfield Seager but matt17r is much easier to type. Credit to Andreeson Horowitz (a.k.a. a16z) - or whoever they borrowed it from - for the name shortening idea. No credit to whoever registered the m20r Twitter handle and never really used it! ;)

I am a Christian…

I am a disciple and follower of Jesus Christ. The Bible is wholly inspired by God and therefore trustworthy. I am saved only by faith in God, not by anything I have done or can do. Faith is a gift from God that I did not and do not deserve. That gift is free to me but cost God dearly.

a father…

I have been married to my beautiful and amazingly supportive wife Melissa since 2004 and we have two wonderful kids who sometimes tolerate my dad jokes. I love being a husband and father even though I’ve still got a lot to learn on both fronts.

an Aussie expat…

We’ve been living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia since August 2020. At one stage we thought the pandemic had ended those plans but God provided us a way. We are short-term workers with CMS and I work at HOPE International School which exists to support world missions.

a runner…

There are far fewer parks, running tracks and open spaces in Cambodia than Australia so these days my running is mostly on the road or chasing a ball at indoor football. There’s no Parkrun here either so I helped start a Parkrun-style run called NW5k.

and a geek.

I used to try and deny my geekiness but now I’ve come to accept it.

I grew up with and love the Mac where I noodled around in HyperCard, FileMaker Pro and REALBasic in the ‘90s and ‘00s.

When the web came along I built Geocities sites, learned a bit of early CSS, learned some Python while maintaining a CMS built using Zope, built 80% of a World Cup 2002 tipping site in PHP and even got paid to build a couple of small business websites in the early ‘00s.

For a long time my coding was limited to scripts and hobbies but from 2016-2019 I worked on a small suite of web apps built in Ruby on Rails. The Ruby community is super friendly, the Ruby language reads almost naturally and I love the way Rails empowers solo developers and small teams to build entire applications.