Hey đź‘‹. I’m Matt.

I love connecting technology communities to products by building systems that inspire open source adoption. I also love learning to lead with openness, honesty by making the implicit explicit.

Teams I’ve managed:

  • The product management team for Production Engineering at Target
  • The product, program, and content teams behind Red Hat’s digital communities, including Opensource.com
  • The community and marketing teams at Sensu, from seed to series A
  • Leading the vision for product owners and DevRel in part of Intel managing open source projects, including Snap
  • Leading the vision for EMC’s advocacy program

Communities I’m a part of:

I work hard to connect and contribute to a broad range of communities of practice. Grouping in order of recency, that includes:

  • Kubernetes, Open Source (the OSI, GitHub, and CNCF), and Developer Relations
  • Python programming language and Go programming language
  • DevOps (via the monitoring & observability sub-tribe)
  • Virtualization (especially VMware), Infosec, and Storage (especially EMC and NetApp)

Communities I’ve Helped Build:

Projects I’ve Contributed To:

I often open small PRs as I work through new problem or as a way of saying thank you to a project. That’s led to contributions to Kubernetes, the CHAOSS community, iPython, Chezmoi, this Notion wrapper for Linux, Slack API Tutorial, Go GitHub library, Slack Go library, Leeroy from Docker, Awesome Maintainers, The Lita project, Homebrew, CHAOSS project, the CNCF Landscape, and many more. I also consulted behind-the-scenes for Exercism and continue to recommend joining their community because I ❤️ them.

Articles

Some of my more popular articles are off domain, like The right and wrong way to set Python 3 as default on a Mac. Here are some more:

Building Product Community — How to think about brand association

Thinking through how close you wish a community to be to your brand–an affinity or upstream community–is an exercise that will pay off in the long run.

Tips for your first 30 days of remote work

I have spent over 10 years working primarily remote, and they have taught me practices I will implement from day one of a new job.

So You Lost Your Job: Now What?

Some of the most talented, thoughtful, and effective people I have ever worked with were recently laid off.

My Approach to Pay Equity as a Manager

Over the years, I have had more impact on people’s job titles, responsibilities, and–importantly–their salaries.

3 tech resume tips to get seen by the hiring manager

I recently reviewed a handful of resumes for friends and mentees, and I saw the same pattern in each.

Sharing the tools that I use to stay productive

It’s a new year (allegedly*), and I’m finding new ways to share who I am and what kind of work I love to do.

A must-follow rule of resume building

I have helped a lot of people refine a pitch: a one-liner that helps them effectively message who they are and what they do well.

Add competencies to your resume

Job hunting as terrible. I keep writing about it in the hopes of your experience being a little less terrible based on some lessons I’ve learned.

Sharing the Job Hunting Pipeline Blueprint

There is nothing like some unexpected job hunting to send a reasonably confident person into a spiral of panic.

Job hunting tips for nonlinear careers

I originally wrote this post while job hunting in 2018. I knew I needed a change from the work I was doing, and I developed a tool (read: spreadsheet) that helped reinforce a few lessons from the process.