About

I'm Matthew Crosswell.

Forty years building software in finance, factories, and hardware — and lately a single question I can't put down: when the account closes or the vendor changes the rules, who still has your data?

Builder

Systems that have to survive contact with reality.

I started writing code four decades ago and never found a good reason to stop. The work has moved through financial systems, industrial machine interfaces, desktop applications, games, and the developer tools I built because the right one didn't exist yet. Different domains, same instinct: build the smallest mechanism that carries the idea, then make it survive a wet Tuesday at 7am.

Most of that time has been spent close to the messy edge — the place where a real machine, a real ledger, or a real deadline refuses to match the tidy diagram. I've learned to trust the working recovery path over the clever architecture, and to let the software say what actually happened rather than what everyone hoped would.

The through-line

Your data should be yours.

These days the centre of gravity is data sovereignty. Control-C takes a clean snapshot of business data every day, because too many companies discover too late that their records only ever lived inside someone else's account. Accounts101 and LedgerOne come at the same problem from other angles. Not rented, not held hostage, not trapped in a SaaS account until the month someone changes the rules.

How I work

Evidence first.

Find the real problem before naming the solution.
Build the smallest useful thing, then prove it works.
A system should recover honestly instead of performing confidence.
Keep the record of truth visible and owned by the people who earned it.
Local-first isn't nostalgia — it's how ownership stays real.

Areas

Across the hard edges.

Hardware integrationFinancial softwareSaaS platformsDesktop applicationsLocal AI delivery systemsTechnical team developmentDeveloper toolingGames and simulations