Hi! I’m Matt Vanderpol.
I’m a software developer and content creator. I’ve got a small dev agency at Red Madrone Solutions where I specialize in custom web development.
I love coding and have several projects that I’m working on pushing forwards. I live in Nevada City, CA with my wonderful wife Amber and 6 of our 7 kids (our oldest is in her senior year of college). We live in a house that my wife and I designed and built.
Projects
Active Projects
Tech projects that I’m actively working on.
AI the Docs
Chat directly with documentation to surface buried nuggets of knowledge and get straight to the point on implementation.
Exploring Alpine.js
A screencast series exploring Alpine.js – a powerful JavaScript framework that adds valuable reactive capabilities in a lightweight package that is easy to integrate with any website.
Skipjack
A web app for better AI interactions. You can add your own content and any public web page to your own personal knowledge cloud which will be mined for relevant context when chatting with an AI system.
TailCraft
A new base theme for WordPress with Tailwind and Alpine.js support. Intended for developers who are creating WordPress themes and want a well-considered framework to build on.
Lifestyle “Projects”
“Projects” that are focused on improving my quality of life.
Building Relationships
Relationships take work. One of the things I do is fortnightly one-on-ones with each of my kids. We grab coffee/cocoa and chat or play games or go for a hike.
Nature Journaling
In order to draw something you have to really see it and this requires stopping and really paying attention. Nature Journaling gives you a framework for this.
Backpacking and Outdoors
Backpacking, hiking, snow play – I’ve always enjoyed getting out and exploring the natural world, be it alone or with friends and family.
Building Habits
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” It’s a constant struggle but Polar Habits helps me develop the habits for good systems.
Past Projects
In the past, but not forgotten…
QAtab
My first SaaS (currently shut down) to make it easier to capture details during the QA cycle of a site build project.
Building a Home
My wife and I bought some land and built a home for our family. It was a tremendous undertaking but hugely rewarding.
Featured Content
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Don’t let data for Alpine.js components blow up your web site
On one of my early projects with Alpine.js I needed to pass some structured data about videos to show in a carousel. The data was an array of objects with key/value pairs like: I was working with PHP on WordPress and the easy solution was to simply pass the data as an argument to the…
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Custom Pulse Card as a Volt Component
A code walk through on how to create a custom Pulse card as a Livewire Volt component with data from the database.
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The Benefits of Retrieval Augmented Generation
Retrieval Augmented Generation adds related context to a prompt so an LLM can give a more accurate answer – especially on untrained topics.
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Streaming AI Chat Response with History to Livewire
Exploration of a pattern to keep history of AI chat while streaming the latest response to the interface for better user experience.