Matt Jeanes
Hey! I'm Matt.
I'm a senior fullstack engineer, technical leader, and all around generalist with over 15 years of experience building digital products.
I discovered programming in middle school and was hooked. Becoming my main hobby and passion, I went on to earn a B.S. in Computer Science, by which point I'd already launched multiple products with thousands of active users. I've been an early or founding engineer at 3 startups and co-founded a small development studio, where I worked with 15+ clients across many different business domains.
Qualities & Values
Professional Experience
As a full-time contractor for 7 years, much of my experience comes from working with clients across many business domains, tech stacks, and requirements. I believe that versatility and having broad experience is key to success, and I strive to be a generalist with depth in many areas.
I thrive in dynamic, fast-paced environments and I've been working full-time remote for 10 years. I think being agile is more important than doing Agile. I believe in moving fast and iterating quickly, while striking the balance of building a solid extensible foundation, making sure we're building the right thing, and being careful to not over-engineer things unnecessarily.
I have a reputation for writing detailed writeups and postmortems which include enough detail for technical and non-technical personas alike, so that the broader team can improve and understand decisions, tradeoffs, and issues. I strive to write clear self-documenting code, only needing to write comments to explain why something was done a certain way when necessary. Commits and PRs are well organized and detailed, so that anyone can understand the history of a project and the decisions made along the way.
Business Domains
Eligibility
US Citizen currently living in Colorado.
Open to
- Full-time employment
- Full-time contract work
- Part-time contract work
Currently only interested in 100% remote positions
Languages
- English - Native
- German - Limited working proficiency (B1/B2)
Work History
Mainly focused on in-product Nudges on github.com to advertise product offerings, encourage growth & usage, and drive revenue
- Rapidly came up to speed in the github.com Ruby on Rails monolith, shipping my first PR to production on day 2 and shipping a total of 33 PRs over my initial 10 weeks
- Created 5+ A|B tests experienced by hundreds of thousands of production users, measured success of the experiment, and increased the treatment experience once statistically significant results proved they were effective in conversions
- Main responsibility was on the implementation and creating automated tests. Also helped iterate on responsive designs, interfaced with cross-functional stakeholders, and analyzed production metrics
- Backported responsive designs and patterns to pre-existing components for consistency
I can't rank Matt highly enough. He's a detailed engineer who can get work done fast with minimal technical debt.
First technical hire to create "Forte 2.0" after the company successfully raised a seed round with a contractor-created prototype and proved its business model. Worked closely with the CTO for initial architecture and modeling and created most of the architecture and core functionality of the new platform.
- Designed and developed the product in a fast and rapidly changing environment, building, iterating, and scaling cross platform features while simultaneously working on new capabilities and supporting 45,000+ users
- Collaborated with leadership and stakeholders to plan and execute our strategic roadmap
- Architected and implemented the core foundation and functionality of the platform including multi-Org support, many-to-many relationships between teachers, students, & instruments, lesson finalization, instrument profile customization, etc
- Led development on major features and systems including our in-lesson VideoCall experience, payment processing and payment history, teacher subscriptions, marketplace matching and booking, lesson recordings, and more
- Created internal tooling to support the business and allow non-technical staff to effectively manage the platform
- Monitored platform usage, traffic, and performance metrics and analyzed user behaviors
- Responsible for the company's infrastructure and integrations, production performance tracking, and issue triaging
- Acted as the company's de facto Business Analyst and created data visualizations, revenue & usage ledgers, and queries to support the company's 10+ business partners and fundraising efforts
Small digital product design and development studio that builds high quality solutions and provides the full range of our expertise to clients with a proven track record across Healthcare, Cybersecurity, Construction, and consumer web/mobile.
Read more about our services, experience, and case studies on our website devshack.io.
Featured Clients
3 year engagement embedded on the frontend and architecture teams, often acting as the bridge between Frontend, Backend, and DevOps teams.
- Became the leading SME in multiple domains (React webapp, Schema Stitched GraphQL server, Typescript microservices, Prometheus)
- Championed and spearheaded their JS to Typescript migration and adoption on a 50k LoC repo
- Led development on and successfully shipped a major initiative with massive (30x+) performance and UX benefits to their biggest impact feature
- Mentored and helped junior and midlevel developers, provided training in Typescript, GraphQL, Git, React, Linux, etc
- Led major architectural changes to their frontend, backend, and data layers; implemented user metrics, server metrics, and logging
- Improved the developer experience via Docker, compilation speed ups, live reload, Typescript, AWS CodeBuild, precommit hooks, etc
[Dev Shack]'s expertise and the resulting work have always been outstanding.
Short-term, high priority project turning design mocks into a pixel-perfect website featuring exciting and engaging animations and custom interactive widgets, winning W3's Silver award for Best Home Page, and also providing me an excuse to break out my Trigonometry.
Matt and Mike came in with expertise and speed that I have never seen before. In such a critical time, they were fundamental to our success.
[Matt] makes sound decisions, collaborates and supports other team members, and moves fast to deliver quality products. [...] Matt is able to handle complex code with ease.
An all-in-one solution for teams to share notes and documents, keep track of tasks, and communicate effectively across iOS, Android and Web platforms.
- Designed and developed the product through multiple revisions, sprints, and rapid feedback loops
- Rapidly built and iterated cross platform features in the group communication and collaboration and management spaces
- Built and maintained the product from whiteboard to production; scaling the existing features and users while simultaneously working on new capabilities
- Featured on Product Hunt
- 2k DAU, 8k MAU, 10k+ active users
Tools to change the way people work by making it more creative, focused, and fun.
- Rapidly prototyped products in the areas of performance reviews, team collaboration, idea generation and development, and structured decision making
- Designed and developed scalable server and client architectures for cross platform web apps
- Responsible for full stack solutions, focusing on delightful user interfaces and intuitive interactions
- Novel crowd-sourced "bus tagging" system to perform on-the-fly schedule adjustment and bus sightings, which predated the university's official app with GPS capable buses by 2 years
- Route delays, GPS Location awareness, unscheduled route changes, route finding, automatic web updates
- Created as a full-time student & maintained for 12 years with 18k+ downloads
- Featured in the student newspaper, The Breeze (Apr 2011)
The app will become indispensable.
Worked in JMU's student-run Technology and Design office as its main technical web developer, with the charter to create and maintain 20+ websites for various departments and organizations on campus.
- Developed websites using PHP and MySQL and did routine maintenance on our two linux servers
- Created a custom Credits and Project Management system for in-house use by our Project Manager
- Worked closely with a cross-functional team consisting of graphic designers, photographers, writers, videographers, etc.
- Trained other team members on Git, PHP, MySQL, and Linux
- Pioneered new WYSIWYG capabilities for their flagship product, including a custom spreadsheet editor with support for formulas and cell merging/splitting
- Created highly interactive webapps, leveraging new HTML5 features like being offline-capable
- Created the frontends for multiple projects from scratch while others worked on the backends
Worked on the Digital Data Collection System (DDCS) team, a cross functional team of ~12 people.
- Created a parser and validator for data coming from submarine based sensor arrays
- Created custom Knoppix-based linux deployments
- Performed, analyzed, and reported hardware performance for LTO tape drives
- Did bugfixes and added functionality to their platform
Technology
Modern fullstack web development
I thrive in a fullstack environment — equally comfortable with creating performant backends, user-friendly & intuitive front-ends, designing scalable information architecture, and diving deep across the entire stack.
My specialty is modern fullstack web development — TypeScript, React, Node.js, GraphQL, and cloud-native infrastructure. I'm always learning new things and use the right tools for the job.
Some examples of the type of work I do:
- Scope, design, and build prototypes & MVPs from varying stages
- Database and GraphQL Schema modeling
- Build a solid extensible foundation for SPAs, establish patterns, provide a reliable "golden path" for the company
- Learn a core business domain or technology and become the resident expert
- Design, review, and implement scalable architectures
- Work closely with cross-functional teammates to get the job done
- Monetize apps with Stripe by implementing Subscription, Product, and Payment support
- Provide in-depth code reviews, architecture reviews, RFCs, and mentoring
- Identify and solve responsive design issues, contributing to UI/UX for intuitive user experiences
- "Buy vs Build" issues, researching all tradeoffs involved between a pre-existing solution and a custom DIY solution
- Triage, troubleshoot, fix, and document production issues
Skills, Tools, & Experience
Some things I'm very familiar with, some things I've used a fair amount, and some things from a former lifetime but have learned from or can refamiliarize myself with if needed. If you'll grant me some leeway in the ranking and strength system, these are roughly prioritized in the order of my proficiency and recency in using them.
Languages
TypescriptJavascriptGraphQLHTML5JSONSQLCSS3SCSSBashRuby on RailsYAMLDenoJavaTerraformObjective-CSwiftKotlinPHPLibraries, Frameworks, and Concepts
ReactNode.jsApolloPrismaAPI DesignVercelNext.jsA|B TestingData Structures & AlgorithmsRESTAuthHerokuExpressHapiReact NativeD3.jsWebsocketsGreenSockMeteorFlowJSAngularJSCordovaIonicjQueryDatabases
PostgresData modelingMongoDBMySQLRedisElasticsearchUI/UX
I won't be replacing your dedicated designer, but I have a decent eye for good design and great intuition for user experience.
TailwindCSSResponsive DesignUI/UXWeb ComponentsSVG animationsCSS animationsFigmaObservability, DevOps, and CI/CD
GitLoggingMetricsPinoTracingDockerGrafanaMetabaseOpenTelemetryPrometheusGitHub ActionsJaegerJenkinsCloud
I've mostly used AWS but have small amounts of experience with GCP and Azure. I've touched other AWS APIs, but not to the extent that I claim any skill with them
AWSCognitoS3LambdaFirebaseFargateRDSSESECRECSEC2SNSGCPAzureCloudflareServices and Platforms
RetoolDaily.coStripeDatadogTwilioSentryPostmanWebpackContentfulTesting
JestCypressPuppeteerStorybookProject Management
GitHubSlackAsanaBitbucketGitLabJiraOperating Systems
MacOSLinuxAndroidiOSWindowsTools
NeovimUnixTmuxCoPilot / AIVSCodeSome items could be ranked higher, but I've chosen not to focus on them (e.g. JSON), and some might arguably be ranked lower if you compare me to a dedicated expert (e.g. SQL).
For example:
- AWS has a massive surface area, but I'm very familiar with the admin management UI, permission model, docs, APIs, etc, and can learn new APIs as needed.
- I have lots of experience with Postgres and Jest using them in their standard way, but I'm neither a dedicated DBA nor Test Engineer.
- I probably know 99.9% of the HTML spec and have coded it for 20+ years, but nobody gets a job for listing HTML as a primary skill :)
Education
Even with a formal education, I've always considered myself to be a self taught developer.
In high school, I experienced firsthand the game-changer that was jQuery, discovered the magic that was server-side rendering with PHP, witnessed the coming future of "DHTML", and participated in the paradigm shift that was AJAX.
I believe the best developers are those that are passionate about the industry and the art; those who have the drive to learn and improve.
There's always more to learn.
Endorsements and Praise
from Colleagues and Clients
I've worked with Matt on multiple projects over the past decade. Most recently at GitHub. He is one of the most talented engineers I've ever worked with. He's an engineer who, when he enters new codebases, makes sure he understands what the code is doing and why and then carefully architects his solutions to ensure they work, are DRY, scalable, maintainable, and he always leaves codebases better than he found them. Furthermore, he's the type of engineer who can write pretty much any software solution from scratch. Yet he's wise enough to take advantage of AI tools when he sees them as a way to accelerate progress. I can't rank Matt highly enough. He's a detailed engineer who can get work done fast with minimal technical debt.
Finding good engineers is hard, and Dev Shack stands out as one of the best. [Matt] worked on the launch of UtilityAnswer and helped us through various iterations of our interface. [He] makes sound decisions, collaborates and supports other team members, and moves fast to deliver quality products. [...] Matt is able to handle complex code with ease. [...] I would highly recommend Dev Shack to technical and non-technical colleagues.
When COVID-19 struck, we had to make a mad scramble to put something in front of our customers to help save small businesses. Matt and Mike came in with expertise and speed that I have never seen before. In such a critical time, they were fundamental to our success.
With contributions including expert full-stack development, sophisticated data visualizations, and deep performance-tuning, [Dev Shack]'s expertise and the resulting work have always been outstanding.
Matt was really critical here. He tracked down so much of the data in the system to help shed light on all this and was pretty spot on with his theories about what was happening
[...] because Matt dove in to test, monitor and learn, we were able to track down the root cause, get it fixed and for the first time get stability of the system in our mid-tier-tests.
I'd just like to take a moment and recognize a few people who helped me out immensely today and helped keep an otherwise busy day from turning into complete madness.
[...] and Matt for jumping in and helping run down this crazy weird bug in our development environment [...] investigating it deeper so we have a better understanding of what went wrong.
[Matt] has done all the app development independently and I am very impressed with his programming and interface design skills. The app will become indispensable.