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Matteo Dante

Articles

Long-form notes on software I have built: how it works, what broke along the way and what I measured.

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  1. The same patch of wet sand twice, side by side: on the left a drone's shadow, on the right the DroneClean output without it.

    4-minute read

    Why I built an app that erases a drone's own shadow

    DroneClean started as a question on my own PC in late September and went online three weeks later. This is what the shadow taught me, and what I would do again.

  2. Conceptual illustration of black dumbbells, an open workout notebook and a brass rest timer floating in space.

    3-minute read

    GymTree: building for the ninety seconds between sets

    A fitness app lives in a strange moment: breathing hard, phone in one hand, nothing to do but rest. Designing for that moment, and for the coach on the other side of it, taught me most of what I know about product.

  3. Conceptual illustration of an open book and study cards connected by copper wire to a lapis-blue sphere in space.

    3-minute read

    Maestro: turning "I want to take better photos" into a course

    I built an iPhone tutor that writes you a course from a goal and will not call it finished until you have actually learned. Here is what it took to trust generated lessons.

  4. Conceptual illustration of paper forms arriving in a dark metal inbox in space.

    3-minute read

    Miniform: a form inbox that never loses a message

    I wanted the contact forms on the websites I build to land in an inbox I own, on a server I run. It turned into a small lesson about what reliability actually means.

  5. Conceptual illustration of a white toy astronaut navigating between four small planets in space.

    3-minute read

    Why my CV is a spaceship

    My website has a normal homepage and a small space game where you fly between planets to read my CV. Here is why I built the game, and the rule that kept it from becoming a gimmick.

  6. Conceptual illustration of a linen notebook and memory cards connected by a copper thread in space.

    4-minute read

    Filo: an AI that remembers you, and learns to forget

    I built a self-hosted conversation agent for reflecting on your own life. The hard part was not making it remember. It was a study that told me to remember less.

  7. Conceptual illustration of a retro CRT and a glass browser window linked by a ribbon of colored 3D triangles in space.

    3-minute read

    Portico: old Direct3D programs, unchanged, in a browser tab

    I open-sourced the piece of a bigger port that made a 2000s graphics program draw in the browser without touching its code. Here is why that mattered to me, and how I know it works.

  8. A beige early-2000s desktop computer and CRT monitor drifting in deep space, the screen showing a fantasy landscape in a browser window.

    13-minute read

    Porting a 400,000-line Windows MMORPG to the browser, multiplayer included

    A 2000s C++ game client runs essentially unchanged in a browser tab and plays online against a private test server. I ported it with a team of AI coding agents.