Hi, I’m Matt. I was born in the early 80’s in Margate, a seaside town in the county of Kent in the UK. Currently I live in Sevenoaks; still in Kent, but closer to London; with my wife, two kids, and our cat.

I hold a BEng (hons) in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Kent.

I also hold a MSc in Broadband and Mobile Communication Networks from the same University after my undergraduate supervisor applied for EPSRC funding on my behalf (and without my knowledge), it was a pleasant surprise, that enabled me to afford to continue to study.

I started my career as a programmer straight away after leaving University. After a couple of years as a junior Delphi, Visual Basic and C# programmer I changed direction. I found Ruby in 2007 via a junior Systems Administrator position at a startup based in London.

I moved from SysOps into Development in 2008 and I’ve been writing Ruby for the last 14 years in various forms.

As of November 2018 I am a Senior Developer at Shopify. I started in the Code Foundations team working to improve the codebase health of the primary Rails monolith.

In May 2020 I moved into the Ruby Infrastructure team where I switched track to work mostly in C, Ruby (and a little Rust) to improve the Ruby language itself.

Working at a lower level to develop programming languages instead of web sites has been a huge shift for me, with a steep learning curve attached. But I am enjoying my work more than ever. I am predominantly focussed on Garbage Collection, and I’ve spoken about my current project at EuRuko, RubyKaigi and Rubyconf (heads up that all of these talks are iterations on the same talk).

Shopify are a global company, Founded in Canada, and I work remotely from my home in the UK.

Previously I have worked at FutureLearn, OnTheBeach and Reevoo amongst others.

About this site⌗

This site is static HTML, generated by Hugo, a static site generator written in Go.

Hosting is provided by Github pages, with my custom domain on top. The theme I’m using is my own fork of Lithium by jrutheiser