\ Welcome to HackerNoon’s Meet the Writer Interview series, where we learn a bit more about the contributors that have written some of our favorite stories.So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.I'm Matías, a Technical Architect from Argentina with over 14 years building backend systems — these days mostly headless commerce at scale, working with GraphQL Federation, Go, TypeScript, and Kubernetes. Outside of work, I'm an open-source maintainer, a cave diver, and a board game designer, which is a stranger combination than it sounds, but they all feed into how I think about systems.\Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about?It was about Mycel, an open-source runtime I built in Go. The premise is that most microservices are 80% the same plumbing — wire up a REST endpoint, transform a payload, push it to a queue, talk to a database — and we keep rewriting that plumbing by hand. With Mycel you describe the service declaratively in an HCL config file: you define connectors and the flows between them, and you get a production-ready service out of it. HackerNoon retitled the piece to "without writing a single line of code," which is a fun hook — and technically true for the person using Mycel. I definitely wrote a few lines of code building the runtime itself, though.https://hackernoon.com/this-is-how-i-built-an-open-source-runtime-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code?embedable=true\Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?Yes, this is squarely my territory: distributed systems, microservices, and the languages I live in — Go, Rust, TypeScript. I also like writing against the grain when I think a "best practice" has hardened into dogma; I recently argued that SOLID is misapplied far more often than it's actually overrated. And every so often, I write something cross-domain — I've drawn parallels between cave diving and distributed systems, since both are about planning for failure in environments that don't forgive improvisation.\Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)Honestly, I don't have a sacred ritual. I write when an idea refuses to leave me alone — usually after I've solved something tricky at work or noticed a pattern that connects two things that shouldn't be related. I draft in plain Markdown, let it sit for a day, then cut about a third of it. The cutting is where the article actually gets good.\Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?Time and depth, in tension. Writing isn't my job — architecture is — so the writing happens in the margins. The hard part is resisting the urge to explain everything. As an engineer, you want every claim airtight and every edge case footnoted, but a reader doesn't need the whole codebase; they need the one insight. Learning to trust the reader has been harder than any technical part.\What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?I want to take Mycel from "a project I built and use" to something a real community builds on. There's a difference between open-sourcing code and having an actual ecosystem around it — people filing issues you didn't anticipate, writing connectors you never imagined, using it in ways that surprise you. Getting there is the next milestone. Tied to that, I'm preparing a conference talk about it; I've shipped a lot of software over 14 years, but standing on a stage and explaining something I designed from first principles would be a real first.\Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?Real-time strategy games. I'll tell myself I'm only playing one round of 0 A.D., and then it's three hours later and I've rebuilt the same civilization four times because I keep wanting to optimize my build order. It's basically the same impulse as refactoring, just less productive.\Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?A few. Cave diving is the big one. I also design board games. Board game design and software architecture turn out to be the same skill wearing different clothes: you're designing a system of rules and watching how people break it.\What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?More on Mycel — there are a handful of design decisions in it (how flows compose, how the connector model stays bidirectional) that I think are worth arguing about in public. I'm also working on a series about Git that goes beyond the usual cheat sheets: how Git practices actually scale from a solo developer, to a team, to a whole organization.\What’s your opinion on HackerNoon as a platform for writers?I like that it treats developers as readers who want substance, not just headlines. Getting a piece on the front page reached people I'd never have found on my own, and the editorial side actually cares about the writing. For someone who writes in the margins of a full-time job, that reach matters a lot.\Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?Just thanks — to the HackerNoon team, and to anyone who read the Mycel piece and went to poke at the repo. If I had to leave people with one thing: the boring, repetitive parts of our work are usually the ones most worth abstracting away. Mycel came out of being tired of writing the same glue code for the hundredth time. Pay attention to what annoys you — that irritation is often pointing at your next project.\Check out Matias Denda’s HackerNoon profile here, and read more of his amazing stories!https://hackernoon.com/u/mdenda \n \