I’m Matt Cockayne. I’ve been building software for about twenty years, most of it in the middle of things: the frameworks, the release pipelines, the bits that have to work before anyone else can do the interesting part.
These days that means Go, Rust, and a lot of infrastructure aimed at one question. When you ship something, can anyone prove it came from you?
The rule
The site’s motto is the whole of it: always leave the codebase better than you found it.
That’s the Boy Scout Rule, and I take it more literally than most people do, because I met it somewhere other than a book. It’s not about grand refactors. It’s the small, cumulative discipline of leaving the campsite tidier than you found it, applied to a function, a module, a pipeline, a team. Do it for long enough and you stop being able to walk past things.
It’s also the reason so much of what I build is plumbing. Somebody has to pick up the litter.
Where the name came from
I was a Cub as a kid, in a small town in the north-east of Scotland, and I loved it. Years later I went back to it as an adult volunteer, because I wanted my children to have the same thing and, if I’m honest, because I wanted some of it back myself. I ended up spending about a decade of evenings and weekends as a leader, mostly with Cubs and Scouts.
It taught me more about mentoring, and about the sheer range of ways people learn, than any job has. It also taught me that a weak leadership team makes volunteering miserable and a strong one makes it joyful, which turns out to be true of engineering departments too.
I stepped back some years ago, when the time simply wasn’t there any more. I don’t rule out going back.
The handle itself was a gift. Around 2015 I was climbing out of a company collapse and a fairly comprehensive burnout, and a friend from the PHP community who’d talked me back into writing code suggested I give a conference talk about the Boy Scout Rule, on the grounds that I’d been a Scout Leader for years and clearly couldn’t stop mentioning it. The name stuck to me, and eventually to everything else. I’ve written about that before.
So: yes, the PHP is real. It’s where the name came from, not where it stopped.
What I actually build
A fairly large estate of open-source Go and Rust modules, most of it extracted from two toolkits I use for everything, plus the infrastructure to sign, release and prove it. It is all public, all documented, and all built the same way, which is the only reason one person can keep it standing.
If you want to see it, the projects page has the lot. Start with whichever solves a problem you actually have.
Getting hold of me
The code lives on GitLab. There’s a Discord if you want to ask something, report something, or tell me I’ve got it wrong. Issues and merge requests on any of the projects are genuinely welcome, especially the ones that start “this didn’t work for me”.