Matias
(he/him)Building the platform for makers and ideators
Chief Technology Officer at SomebodyMakeIt
Parent, inventor/founder with colossal ADHD. Emacs & note taking nerd. Devoted to alleviating systemic poverty & global warming. Philosophically hopeful about synthetic sentience. He/him.
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Track Record
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Career13
CTO & Cofounder building the invention platform for makers and ideators
Strategically transitioned from Engineering Management to one-on-one mentoring. Leading a team of 1 small, but highly demanding individual, with a focus on skill development, balancing, conflict resolution, and problem solving. Deferring sprints in favor of tummy time and scooting backwards.
Served the engineering team at DigiFarm, with the mission empower farmers with cutting-edge satellite imaging and decision making. While leading the engineers and supporting department heads, I scaled the team from a small group of part-time freelancers into a strong, full-time team of 10 software engineers across four departments. Some accomplishments: - Built up the team from its early beginnings, transforming it into a well-structured Engineering team. - Established engineering departments, processes, and procedures; mentored, promoted, and nurtured 4 department leads to drive key results in each area of Engineering. - Standardized the Engineering culture, deployments, integrated monitoring solutions, and streamlined team and inter-team workflows, drastically reducing bugs and increasing both output and stability. This complete overhaul allowed DigiFarm to accelerate R&D and engineering impact, enhancing our ability to revolutionize decision-making in agriculture. By empowering department leads, we improved velocity, stability, and work-life balance across all Engineering roles, ultimately affecting what mattered most to me personally; helping both farmers and the planet.
Built the best code learning technology in existence; scrims, with the fantastic team at Scrimba. Scrims are interactive (really!) videos where the students can pause the instructor and edit, play with, and even break the code at any time. No set up, no "doesn't work on my machine", no "I did what the tutorial said but it's not working" - just pressing play and jumping right back into the video to keep learning. Some responsibilities: - Building an optimal learning experience for students, including the scrim player, student dashboard, and course pages. - Integrating services like Discord and CloudFlare. Fixing bugs reported by both the team and our community. - Adapting and expanding our internal Retool and Grafana tools. - Managing infrastructure, including analytics, monitoring, servers, and caching. - Shaping best practices, contributing to a strong engineering culture. Some accomplishments: - Launching a Discord bot with a feedback point system to 15k+ learners, adding a new dimension of social learning and network building. - Learning and contributing to a custom open source language called Imba, building out the documentation structure and community involvement.
Built interactive learning experiences through the CodeCombat and Ozaria games with truly excellent team members, working across functions, collaborating with teachers and instructors. Some responsibilities: - Software engineering in general, building features, fixing bugs, reviewing code, and generally building the startup. - Expanding build systems, infrastructure, and web applications from AWS to Alibaba / Aliyun. - Contributing across the stack with Vue.js, Javascript, Typescript, Express.js, MongoDB, and Redis. Some accomplishments: - Architected and built our interactive tutorial system, connecting educators, designers, and learners. - Led and built Salesforce sync and automation with the sales team. - Led and orchestrated MongoDB upgrade across 5 codebases, reducing costs by 60%. - Led cross functional internal training of the test and QA automation systems.
- Software development across the stack, building out new features, and bug fixing. - Built decentralized Ethereum bounties infrastructure in Python on AWS. - Automated Twitter bounty retweeting.
Worked on the DevOps team scaling Skillshare.com to be a global learning platform, contributed across the stack in AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, PHP, Node.js and Serverless. Some responsibilities: - Building, managing, and securing all infrastructure, internal tools, development workflows, and development environments for other engineering teams. - Building features, fixing bugs, and everything else as a software engineer in a startup. - Scaling to hundreds of thousands of users. Some achievements: - Built Kubernetes and Docker infrastructure, transforming the engineering workflows. - Creating the personalized QA environments so all engineers could parallelize their work, test their code, and deploy without affecting others. - Hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and building up the DevOps team from zero, while supporting 60+ team members across the company. - Creating Serverless "chat ops" infrastructure automation to bridge the gap between full stack engineers and controlling our infrastructure.
Developed and managed hybrid web app projects in Cordova, Three.js and Meteor.js
Led all software development and technical aspects of Cipio Architected and followed through on development tasks
Managed the app team and everything involved with mobile tech within Cipio
Worked on an iOS project using Objective-C, SIP, AFNetworking, and Apache
- iOS app development from start to finish, collaborating with in-house designers. - Guiding freelance Android developers. - Built an iOS app that saved lives (especially children), used for medicinal dosage calculations in the Norwegian healthcare system.
- Creating and maintaining large proprietary internal tools for building virtual massively online multiplayer worlds. - Writing C++ and C# development across tools, game engine, and databases. - Created new pipelines and ensured steady workflow between tools and MMORPG game client and server, decreasing deploy time from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.
Education1
in Game Programming Degree with focus on software engineering, C++, game AI, game engine programming, mathematics and physics, algorithms and data structures and graphic engine programming
Activities / Societies: Student help councillor in C++, leader of OpenGL team, leader of intern team
Projects3
Legemiddelregning was the first app I made from scratch, and it was very important to me for many reasons. This app was made in collaboration with the Norwegian Nurses Association with the goal of reducing medicinal error rates and improving safety. The app was designed to calculate the correct amount of medication a patient will need, based on their weight. Working on Legemiddelregning was a deceivingly simple challenge. The designer I worked with did an incredible job of making an elegant and straightforward user interface. Making a calculator is a very basic thing, and many students learn how to do this during their schooling. My school background in game development means that I had never programmed a calculator before this. While working on it, I tested the app relentlessly, to make sure the medical information was correct. . I learned a lot about usability when it is truly at your fingertips - where I had mostly big-design-tool-complex-interfaces before. This app is used actively each day by nurses in Norway, and continues to bring value into the lives of those who use it and are helped by it.
Veileder i Pediatri is a pocket-reference in Pediatric medicine, and it was created to bring pertinent information to the field as fast as possible. The bulk of my work on this project was finding a way to take the appropriate content and make sure it fits on a fixed size screen. In order to keep the information as current as possible, I made a parser that reads both the live-updating content server and the web-only table and image content. I enjoyed working on this project because I had the opportunity to create something better than a web based information lookup. It was also a challenge, the data we were filing into the app was being transitioned into a new CMS. Neither the new or old system supported the delivery of tables or pictures, so I built a parser that could handle tables and pictures, as well as continuously updating the information and changes in the CMS. I learned a lot about using web views as the main way of delivering content within an app. I also spent some time walking through the content for the app, making sure the searches were consistently finding the most revenant information as quickly as possible. It was a really fulfilling experience to make an app that actively helps people every day
The app for Nordea was created to connect users with Nordea bank via video chat in order to discuss direct investment banking. The app was designed to show the opportunities and differences between investment options with Nordea. Each option screen was placed on it’s own “card”. When selected, the active card would slide into the main viewable area, and the other cards would slide out. Each card kept its information and controls on it, so once the cards were created we simply had to move them around. This app was really interesting to make because it didn’t follow the standard steps of an iOS app with view controllers and standard navigation. It replaced that entire stack with a view movement concept. In the end, doing work on each card like this ended up being faster than using view controllers and a full navigation stack. We had more control over exactly how we wanted each piece to work, and it was in one way freeing to work outside of the standard. I got to learn a lot more about view animation and management than I had in any other project.