I am Jack Mordaunt, an Australian software developer working remotely. I build native desktop software and small, sharp command-line tools. I work in Go and Odin by choice, Rust and C where they fit, and TypeScript when the program is a web page.
The standard I build to is software that is lean, efficient, powerful and sovereign. In practice that means a small dependency tree, native platform APIs rather than a runtime that pretends they do not exist, and binaries meant to build and run a decade on. The oldest thing here, icnsify, is from 2018 and still maintained; the rest has that to live up to. Where a well-made C library already exists, I bind to it rather than rewrite it, because C is the lowest common denominator every platform speaks. That is also what draws me to Odin: a C alternative built for the joy of programming.
I prefer client-side work, the kind a person runs on their own machine, and I am comfortable a long way down the stack: COM interfaces written in pure Go for Windows audio and notifications, Objective-C bridges on macOS, FFmpeg linked directly on Linux.
Day to day I also work full stack on the web: several front ends, a Postgres backend and four third-party integrations between them. I know that world well enough to choose native on purpose.
Agents
I write software with coding agents, and I hold the result to the same standard as anything written by hand. An agent is fast and confidently wrong, so the useful engineering is in the mechanisms around it: review is a hybrid gate, static checks and narrow model readers, that gives an agentic loop fast, converging feedback on every change before it is committed, and measures the commit message too; brain-cli gives agents a shared memory of what was decided and why, so nothing is re-argued and nothing is quietly redone; and every change to this domain’s server boots the real configuration in a virtual machine and walks it as a browser, the go tool and git would, before it ships. The techniques move quickly and I move with them. The gate does not.
Direction
I am building toward a native stack that beats the web on resources and competes with it on delivery: patch updates, a CPU-rendered GUI, and a WebAssembly target that meets the browser on its own ground. Offline first, with your data kept on your machine and never monetised, because the surest way not to leak data is never to hold it. The browser should be for web pages; applications belong to the machine.
Everything I publish lives at its origin on this domain, mirrored to GitHub and sourcehut. The work page has the case studies and the code index has the repositories.
Leita, a disk space analyzer for Linux, Windows and macOS, is the one I sell: mordaunt.dev/leita.
Get in touch if you have a program that needs to be small, native and built to last.
Mordaunt is Norman French for biting, as in a remark. The family motto is a line of Virgil, Nec placida contenta quiete est: not content with quiet rest. The work is built in that spirit.