Matt Platts

Full-Stack Developer & DevOps Engineer

About Me

I've been a full-stack web developer, software engineer, and programmer since 1998, with humble beginnings writing games on a ZX81 in 1983. Initially specializing in bespoke e-commerce and content management systems based on my own platform, later in banking and web security, I'm also experienced as a Team leader and Project manager.

I'm currently based between Gerrards Cross, near London, UK, and Silicon Valley, California, as a senior software and DevOps engineer for global cybersecurity leaders Symantec (now a part of Broadcom), a job I love.

Alongside all the standard web development work, gained through years contracting for agencies alongside my own projects (some of which have two decades of development behind them now), I've been involved in a number of interesting projects beyond basic web development including writing frameworks from scratch (in Perl and PHP), writing PHP language extensions in C, and creating my own templating language and parser.

Since 2016, I have been involved with DevOps using Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, CI/CD, etc.

Skills

Career History

A complete career history from 1997 to the present day can be found here.

Case Studies and Career Highlights

Some more in depth stories from my career over the years can be found here.

Featured Project: JavaScript Pacman Game

My JavaScript Pacman game from 1999 had a rewrite when I was between jobs in 2016, I'm still pleased with this as it's actually influenced from something I tried to write in Basic on an Oric 1 computer in about 1985 - the core code still runs on the same principles I came up with back then! Right now it seems to run best on Mac (and I haven't been near a Windows machine in years to test it unfortunately!) The game has seen occasional updates, with the last being in 2019 when I added an algorithm to generate random mazes.

Play it here. Some notes I once wrote on this are here.


Music & Studio

My tech career began in the music industry in 1997 when I was working for Delerium Records. I managed their in house database and built and maintained their associated e-commerce web site for over ten years. My music industry work has been an interesting sideline and creative outlet - I've also worked for and run labels, been a guitar and stage tech, have been heavily involved in promotion and events, and also of course as a musician. I've played a part in a number of bands — initially as a guitarist and later as a drummer. I ran 'The Metal Farm' studios in Gerrards Cross from 2007-2022.

My musicians site is a little out of date but slowly coming together and can be found here.

Contact & Social Links

Feel free to reach out or connect: