About

I’m Matthew Ault. I work at the intersection of cognition, systems, and engineering — exploring how complex structures behave, drift, and can be understood through clear, first-principles models.

My background is in distributed systems, ingestion pipelines, and real-time media platforms. Earlier in my career at Segment I built and debugged large-scale data pipelines in a high-agency engineering culture, an experience that shaped how I think about incentives, organisational structure, and the emergent behaviour of complex systems.

In recent years my work has expanded beyond software. I apply systems engineering to computational, human, and organisational behaviour — mapping structures, diagnosing root causes, and understanding how change actually happens. This is forming the basis of a broader project I call Cognitive Systems Engineering.

Foobarcat is my personal home on the internet. Here I write, experiment with ideas, and occasionally help teams untangle the technical and organisational knots that make engineering harder than it needs to be.