~/about $ cat about.txt
Hi, I'm Matt Creenan — a 40-ish-year-old software engineer in Buffalo, NY. I've spent 20+ years building across full-stack development, data engineering, and DevOps, and I tend to lead complex projects and set technical direction.
Lately I'm obsessed with agentic coding: harnesses, runtimes, and tools that make coding agents faster and more trustworthy by keeping the boring parts deterministic.
I'm married with two kids, a dog scared of his own shadow, and a cat that wants to be a dog. Off the clock I'm watching the Bills with my wife and son, or suffering through the Sabres alone.
~/now $ cat now.txt
Principal Engineer
@ Totality LMS — a Valmar Holdings company
Before that I spent four years as a Senior Staff Engineer at Torch, where I shipped a company-wide AI Slack agent, in-product LLM features, and a greenfield frontend platform, and built AI-native engineering workflows with custom agents, skills, and routines.
~/projects $ ls -t
- SHOUT An agent harness where the runtime drives and the model judges. A local coding workspace: chat with an agent, review proposed changes, approve edits, and watch every model, tool, and VM event in an Inspector. Skills are small ALLEN programs run as slash commands — the VM owns the control flow and asks the model only for typed judgments.
- JOSH/ALLEN A programming language and runtime for agent-written programs. Instead of looping an agent through every shell command, the agent writes a small, typed ALLEN program up front. Rule-based work stays deterministic; the program makes typed, capability-scoped calls back into the agent only when it needs judgment.
- palimpsest Build your org's engineering guide with agents. A starter kit and CLI (`pal`) for a living, single-file HTML engineering handbook: scrollspy ToC, zoomable Mermaid diagrams, linked code references, and an in-page "Suggest a change" flow. The tool does the scaffolding; an agent does the writing.
- Frost A bare-bones design system for agent-made HTML artifacts. A framework-agnostic visual system for the things agents write for you to read — briefs, decision records, research notes, and decks — with a token contract and usage guidance written for agents.
- Apollo Codex Pet My dog, as an animated coding-agent companion. Apollo in three art styles for the Codex CLI and Orca. The base art came from the hatch-pet skill, and the animations were cut from Veo clips, then keyed, loop-matched, and assembled into spritesheets by a small script pipeline.
- TRMNL AI Usage Claude Code + Codex rate limits on an e-ink display. A TRMNL private plugin that shows how much of the 5-hour and weekly Claude Code and Codex windows I have left, side by side on the e-ink screen on my desk.
~/work $ tail work.log
- 2026 — Present
Principal Engineer
Totality LMS (a Valmar Holdings company)
- 2022 — 2026
Senior Staff Engineer
Torch
- Designed and shipped a company-wide AI Slack agent that answers employee questions grounded in our help content, live operational data, and codebases — our sources of truth — with guardrails for safe, accurate responses.
- Built in-product LLM features — a coaching chat assistant, summarization, and light RAG over our content.
- Built AI-native development workflows — authoring custom agents, skills, and routines for support triage, QA testing, and a daily engineering brief.
- Led the team between engineering managers, providing technical direction and continuity through the transition.
- 2019 — 2022
Engineering Manager, Data
Delaware North
Managed 4 senior engineers across the data platform, integrations, and new solutions, stabilizing the legacy platform through the post-COVID transition to keep critical reporting flows live.
- 2014 — 2019
Senior SOA Engineer, Senior Data Engineer
Delaware North
Built a data platform from scratch for a critical BI project (99.9%+ API uptime through 2022), developed ETL processes including a custom serverless pipeline framework, and delivered multiple stand-alone solutions for business projects.
- 2013 — 2014
Senior Programmer
LocalNet / CoreComm / Exhibio LLC
Drove a stalled multi-tier web application to launch, built a new ISP billing system from scratch, and deployed a Haraka (Node.js) SMTP server with custom plugins integrating internal systems.
- 2006 — 2012
Vendor Integrations Engineer, Lead Engineer
Synacor — Williamsville, NY
Led design and development of a greenfield platform for internal and external tooling, drove the team's adoption of agile practices as Scrum Master, and mentored junior developers while introducing new technologies like Riak and Solr.
~/contact $ cat contact.txt
- githubgithub.com/mcreenan
- linkedinlinkedin.com/in/matt-creenan
- bluesky@matt.creenan.me
- twitter@mcreenan
- email show email