A diagram of the systems behind this site, in four groups. At home: a MacBook Pro, local AI models, the AI coding agents I work with, Tailscale, Home Assistant, Raspberry Pis, a Gitea server and a CI runner. On DigitalOcean: one Docker droplet running Pocket ID for sign-in and the apps Family Board, Party Invites, Dairy Repro, little by little, Music Recaps and a text-to-speech service. On DreamHost: this site. In cloud AI: the Claude API. Releases flow from the MacBook through Gitea and the CI runner to the droplet and this site.

Dad / Director / DM

Matthew
Kampschmidt

Raising a family. Experimenting and learning. Leading teams that build things that matter.

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About

Engineer. Leader.
Occasional Dungeon Master.

I'm a software engineering leader based in the Rochester, NY area, directing more than two dozen staff in mixed roles across multiple government acquisition systems. It's the kind of work where a missed STIG or a bad deploy has real consequences, and I've built a career around getting both right.

My background spans the full stack: Java/Spring Boot backends, Oracle databases I'd describe as "lovingly complex", Angular frontends, and AWS deployments in regulated environments. I've been in software long enough to know the hardest part is usually the people, and the most rewarding part too.

Outside of work, I'm rolling dice in D&D/Daggerheart campaigns, exploring procedurally generated planets, or tinkering with the home lab. Sometimes I'm out helping my wife, who runs a 220+ year old family dairy farm in Spencerport, with her robots or IT systems, or just changing a filter.

Technical Stack

What I Work With

Backend

Java Spring Boot JDBCTemplate JPA

Database

Oracle and ANSI SQL PL/SQL Analytical Queries Stored Procedures Performance Tuning

Frontend

Angular TypeScript JavaScript HTML SCSS CSS

Cloud & Compliance

AWS GovCloud FedRAMP STIGs NIST

DevOps

Atlassian Jira Confluence Bitbucket Jenkins CI/CD Docker Docker Compose Gitea

AI & Developer Tooling

Codex Claude Code OpenCode Azure Foundry Custom Agents MCP Servers Node.js
Engineering Leadership

Leading Teams
That Ship

Team Development

Managing more than two dozen staff in mixed roles across government acquisition programs, contracts, and corporate systems. Leading, mentoring, fostering career and technical growth, and keeping the team functional under the weight of federal compliance requirements.

Agile Coaching

Leading Scrum and Kanban transitions for teams doing complex, high-stakes work. Building sustainable delivery cadences that don't collapse under government contract pressure.

DoW Domain Expertise

Deep knowledge of government acquisition systems and the constraints that shape them, from procurement lifecycles to the organizational dynamics that make or break a program.

Security-First Engineering

FedRAMP, STIGs, and NIST compliance treated as design constraints, built into process, tooling, and team culture from day one.

Beyond Work

The Rest of It

Table

Tabletop RPGs

Running D&D and Daggerheart for the adults, Magical Kitties Save the Day for the kids. Character builds get the same methodical energy as system architecture, with too many notes.

Games

Exploration Games

Planet Crafter, No Man's Sky, Civilization, anything that drops you on an empty planet and says "build." It's professionally relevant, honestly.

Home

Home Automation & Lab

Home Assistant, local AI models, surveillance systems, and robust home and farm networking.

Farm

Family Farm

My wife runs a 220+ year old family dairy farm in Spencerport, NY, a thread connecting Rochester's agricultural history to the present. The original legacy system: no patches, no rollbacks.

Now

What's on the Table

What I'm focused on right now.

Work

Building AI agentic tooling and workflows: custom agents, MCP servers, and integrations that change how the team operates.

Expanding our applications to align with DoW executive orders and guidance. The compliance landscape is moving fast and the architecture has to keep up.

Deepening Agile maturity across teams, closing the gap between the ceremonies we do and the principles behind them.

Making

Designing printable web games that run in any browser. Early stages.

Running our parties on an invitation app I built: invites, RSVPs, guest logistics and the thank-yous afterwards, without a corporate platform in the middle.

Building a music-lesson app that turns my kids' weekly lesson notes into AI-generated practice exercises: real notation, tab, and playback. Live at home and iterating.

Wiring our family task board into Claude: a remote MCP server, interactive MCP App cards in the chat, and passkey single sign-on through a self-hosted Pocket ID.

Putting that board on the kitchen wall: a shared tablet display anyone can read, edits unlocked per person by PIN or pattern, and the family's subscribed calendars folded into the day.

Shipped reproduction analytics for my wife's family dairy farm, rebuilt from the raw herd exports to replace a spreadsheet that had quietly broken. Live and in use.

Shipped little by little: weekly practice flashcards for the kids' math facts, spelling and vocabulary, where a photo of the teacher's sheet becomes draft cards a parent checks before anyone practices.

Home Lab

Expanding Home Assistant to track our pets and plants: presence, motion, feeding, soil moisture. The infrastructure brain applies to small problems too.

Migrating away from big corporate automation and media platforms toward local-first: local AI via llama.cpp, local music, local media.

Playing

Storm King's Thunder: running as DM.

Call of the Netherdeep: in the party on this one. Different side of the table.

Contact

Get in Touch

Professional inquiries, collaboration, or just want to talk about D&D/Daggerheart builds.

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