Hi!

Hi there! You’ve reached the website of Matt Young. I’m a 22 year old 🇦🇺 Australian Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) student at the University of Queensland, and a part-time Graduate Software Engineer at Emesent.

I completed my undergraduate Bachelor of Computer Science degree between Feb. 2021 and July 2024, also at UQ.

Thanks for stopping by my website, I hope you enjoy your stay here.

What am I working on?

My current research focus is my Honours thesis project, TaMaRa: an automated Triple Modular Redundancy EDA flow for the open-source Yosys EDA tool to protect FPGAs and ASICs from Single Event Upsets in spaceflight/high reliability environments. I will be working on this through to about July 2025. The plugin is written in C++20, and includes extensive verification based on traditional testbenches, formal verification and also fuzzing. When it’s finished, TaMaRa will be available under the permissive Mozilla Public License v2.0, and the papers under CC-BY.

I also work part-time as a Graduate Software Engineer at Emesent, where I am a member of the SLAM team. My job involves helping to maintain our cutting-edge, in-house LiDAR-inertial SLAM solution called Wildcat, written in C++17. My work at the moment mostly consists of upgrading/modernising our cross-platform compiler infrastructure and optimising our build times. In the past, I maintained our in-house calibration stack, wrote a high-performance, low-memory PLY file parser, and prototyped a fast lossless LiDAR data compression method. You can see more on my LinkedIn below if you’re interested.

You may also be interested to see my list of projects.

What am I interested in?

For the past few years, my main interest has been computer engineering/digital design: processor design, EDA techniques and digital ASIC design.

That being said, I’m also interested in a lot of other things! To list them off:

Robotics
Computer graphics
Retro computing/emulation
High-performance and distributed computing
Gamedev (mostly engine development)
Cybersecurity (binary exploitation and reverse engineering)
Data compression, file formats, and serialisation
Lexers and parsers
Embedded systems

I have worked or continue to work in a number of the above areas.

Generalising the specific fields above into a more broad statement is a really hard thing to self-reflect on! What do they all have in common? Broadly speaking across all my interests, I care the most about:

When I feel like I’m “breaking new ground” or doing something complex and novel
A solution being efficient. I’m deeply passionate about computational efficiency (and efficiency in general), and desire to extract all the performance I can from a system I’m designing while using as little resources as possible
- This is where I believe engineering shines: in the compromises. The goals of maximising performance while minimising resource usage are conflicting, so it takes a lot of skill to select the correct compromises
When deep, low-level knowledge of computer systems (perhaps even designing those systems from scratch) can enable high-performance/cutting-edge applications
When I’m able to solve problems creatively, in new and interesting ways
My work having a visible impact; it solves real problems for real people, and I feel like I’ve accomplished something significant

What’s coming up?

After I finish my Honours thesis, TaMaRa, I plan to publish it in an academic journal and perhaps even attend a conference if I’m able to. Then, I have one more semester of undergraduate subjects before finishing my BCompSc(Hons) degree.

After that? I’m tossing it up, but at the moment I’m either considering staying with my employer Emesent, or starting a PhD at one of UNSW, USyd, Macquarie or UQ focusing on chip design and digital EDA methods. This PhD would aim to be the first in Australia to produce a chip manufactured on the Sky130 process node. I’m currently thinking of extending my TaMaRa algorithm to work produce circuits with better power, performance and area (PPA) by using probabilistic methods target to ASICs. In any case, we’ll see, so stay tuned I suppose.

Outside of tech stuff, in 2025 I’m also looking to start training to be a technical scuba diver (see below).

Trivia

Hobbies

I’m very fond of scuba diving!
- Qualifications: PADI Rescue Diver, PADI Advanced Open Water Scuba Diver, have ~75 dives
- In 2025, I’m working on becoming a technical diver too (starting off through PADI and then maybe TDI)
- In the future I hope to execute some pretty advanced deep, technical wreck dives (for example, diving the trickier spots in Chuuk Lagoon)
- I’m considering looking into being a volunteer public safety diver if it’s possible in Australia
I’m pretty interested in audio engineering and music production, and occasionally make bad noises in a DAW
- although nothing’s come of it yet :)
I’m a big fan of electronic music, especially DnB; and also hard rock/metalcore/alt rock
I also every now and then write screenplays and short stories, particularly in the horror/cyberpunk genre
- I might publish some of these here… someday….

Nerd stuff

I daily drive Arch Linux (btw 🤓) with KDE Plasma 6 as my DE
- One day I’d like to migrate to FreeBSD
I use Neovim as my editor and WezTerm as my terminal emulator
- Check out my le epic dotfiles if you’re so inclined
I have a very small homelab setup consisting of Tailscale and a second hand Dell Optiplex that runs various services
- It also runs Arch btw
Although I’m not an electrical engineer by trade, I do like to tinker with electronics

Personal stuff