Hey 👋. I’m Matt.

I love building products developers love. I thrive as organizations scale by creating systems that keep priorities clear, defining value with metrics that matter, and coaching teams to grow with challenges. My leadership empowers through accountability, builds trust through transparency, and inspires everyone to be a catalyst for change.

Teams I’ve managed:

• Product management teams unifying all of engineering through the Target Application Platform (TAP)
• The product management team for Production Engineering at Target, including DevEx, SRE, and incident response
• The product, program, and content teams behind Red Hat’s digital communities, including Opensource.com
• Community and marketing teams at Sensu, from seed to series A
• Leading the vision for product and DevRel in part of Intel managing open source projects, including Snap
• Leading the vision for EMC’s first international community advocacy and gamification programs

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:

• Systems of Thought inspired by Team Topologies, Wardley Maps, and John Cutler
• Product Management through podcasts like Melissa Perri’s and Product School
• Kubernetes, Open Source (the OSI, GitHub, and CNCF), and Developer Relations
• Python programming language and Go programming language
• DevOps through the monitoring, observability, and distributed system sub-tribes
• Virtualization (especially VMware), Infosec, and Storage (especially EMC and NetApp)

Communities I’ve helped build:

• Enable Architect as the founding editorial lead.
• Opensource.com as a Technical Editor and designer of the Correspondent program.
• CHAOSScast podcast to highlight the value of open source and common metrics.
• DevRel Collective as a maintainer, designer of the rebrand, and creator of the website (v1).
• The Geek Whisperers podcast as a co-creator and co-host for 5 years.
• Commitmas: learning GitHub socially to collaborative learn Git and GitHub with the vBrownBag community.
• The Sensu Community leading community initiatives from maintainer practices to user summits.
• Snap: the open telemetry framework (EOL 2018) building brand, documentation, maintainer and contributor strategy.
• The EMC Elect (EOL 2017) as program lead, designing the business plan, brand, and community engagement.
• The Basho Community (EOL 2017) as the community leader and a maintainer.

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 Obsidian, 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:

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. It started as part of The Geek Whisperers, where we met with people to help them take the next step in their career. We were terribly underqualified, but that’s never a concern. People need to talk to others–anyone–to refine their pitch. It’s more a need for practice more than guidance.

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. I recounted my own experience with recently in this post.

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.

MAC ERROR ON PIP INSTALL ENDS UP BEING CLANG AND XCODE

I have been having intermittent installation errors with Python packages on my Mac. They occur on anything Python 3.7.x or 3.8.x after I set up a virtual environment and pip install after that (note that I manage my Python versions with pyenv).

AN (EVEN MORE) PRACTICAL GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTION

I had the pleasure of speaking at DevOps Minneapolis to a great group of people. In it we explored why I’m fascinated by open source, how it’s growing as a career opportunity, and then dove deep into the terminology that can be confusing at times. I called the talk a “practical guide” because it includes all the lesser-discussed parts of the effort: understanding terminology, feeling okay practicing, offering PRs for small improvements like correcting a typo. It was a great time and many came up to discuss it afterward.

CREATING A CONTRIBUTOR EXPERIENCE FOR HUMANS

In preparation for the wonderful Open Source 101, I wanted to challenge my assumptions on what makes a great contributor experience by asking.

COMMUNITY METRICS: SHARE OF VOICE

One of the dark arts of measurement

This is part three on a series exploring metrics that can position a Community program as a successful business investment. Part one gives an overview you may want to read first.

COMMUNITY METRICS: WHAT’S THE ROI OF STICKERS?

To start this series on metrics off right, an aside is needed.

THE VALUE OF COMMUNITY METRICS

What does it look like for Community to be a quantifiable value to a company? How does that differ from it being a corporate obligation?