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:

THE OPEN SOURCE MONITORING STACK AT STAPLES

Snap has led to a collaboration with the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at Staples. This group has built what many are chasing: a platform that is ready to support production by monitoring their heterogeneous environment with open source projects.

INTRODUCTION TO AD HOC TELEMETRY WITH SNAP AND GRAFANA

What makes Snap different?

That’s the right question to ask and one I answered hundreds of times in the last couple weeks. It began at O’Reilly Velocity as Ops-minded teams were curious about the introduction of Snap to the Open Source toolkit. The conversations continue this week at (my first) Monitorama, which is the most amazing Operations-centric conference I’ve ever attended. There are a lot of familiar faces across the two and for good reason: people want to understand the how and why of data center operations.

WHAT I MEAN BY “TELEMETRY”

Snap is titled “the open telemetry framework.” I’ve been focused on getting us all comfortable using Snap, but I (rightfully) keep getting asked the bigger question.

THE GUTS OF TASKS: HOW SNAP RUNS

My last post dug into the how-to of running Snap. The steps are worth outlining as we continue to get familiar with the project:

SNAP’S FIRST GUI IS GRAFANA!

Snap has been a beautiful CLI-based tool for 4 months now. I shared how to get up and running last time and there’s more command-line tutorials to come (or you can always checkout the README). Today, however, is a special day for a totally different reason.

MY HOW-TO FOR THE SNAP TELEMETRY FRAMEWORK

Updated November 30th, 2016

Today was the announcement that Snap reached a 1.0.0 release. On our journey toward this milestone, we did a rename of the binaries used in Snap (snapd is now snapteld and snapctl is snaptel) to avoid a conflict with another package. Since this post is the most popular of our series on Snap, so I updated it given this change. Enjoy!

10 JOB TITLES AND WHY YOU MIGHT LIKE THEM (OR WON'T)

A note: This post was created on a previous domain and migrated in 2018

3 RESOURCES TO LEARN (MORE) ABOUT GITHUB COMMITS

A note: This post was created on a previous domain and migrated in 2018{: style=“color:gray; font-size: 80%; text-align: center;”}

WHAT TWO COMMUNITIES TAUGHT ME ABOUT MY EXPECTATIONS FOR COMMUNITY

A note: This post was created on a previous domain and migrated in 2018{: style=“color:gray; font-size: 80%; text-align: center;”}

THE IMPACT OF MISTAKEN SALES CYCLES — AN ANALYSIS OF YELP

“You shouldn’t use Yelp,” told a new friend of mine. “Their sales model is extortion that bullies local businesses. And besides, people on there just post when they’re upset.”