Matthew Walker's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

📖 Summary

I've been a software engineer for over 20 years. I've spent the past 15 in the game industry, building Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. I've focused mostly on developing server and back-end systems, tools, and processes. I focus first on helping my team succeed by collaborating, removing obstacles, and solving problems using the right tools for the job. Throughout my career I've alternated between being a "leader"​ and a "contributor"​, and I'm equally comfortable in either capacity. I've learned that leadership occurs at all levels, so I try to lead by example regardless of my role. Solving problems with a team is what excites me, whether I am at the helm or manning the oars. Specialties: Massively multiplayer online (MMO) server architecture, distributed systems, agile development, continuous integration, continuous deployment, DevOps. Please check out my blog, Engines of Delight, at https://gameserverarchitecture.com/Senior Software Engineer / Independent Consultant @ Designed and implemented server-side game and infrastructure systems for the War Commander: Rogue Assault and Game Services Platform teams. Implemented subsystem for retrieving server-side game content from heterogeneous data stores. Implemented chat service in Scala and Akka. Integrated game services with enterprise logging infrastructure using Kafka, Flume and custom Log4J plugin. Improved and optimized our automated server deployment process using Puppet and Bash. Implemented a developer tool set for simulating production deployments on developer machines using Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, and Bash. Refactored and optimized our Maven-based build system to improve both developer and CI build times. Performed comparative analysis of legacy JVM stack with candidate C#/Mono microservice-based stack. Contributed to migration from legacy JVM stack to C#/Mono Microservice stack. Implemented data access layer for Microservice stack using C#. Rewrote legacy Chat service in C# for Microservice stack. Implemented custom distributed performance testing framework based on NUnit using C# and Redis. Integrated StatsD metrics collection API into our service code. Created Grafana dashboards for presentation of perf testing metrics. Generally championed automated testing practices to the server team. Performed detailed analysis and debugging of runtime- and platform-specific performance problems using the Mono and MSVS profilers and custom experiments. Identified significant performance bottlenecks that occurred only on Mono and recommended solutions. Conducted general performance testing using ApacheBench and the NUnit-based framework. Mentored other engineers and championed application of SOLID engineering principles, agile practices, and skill set development. From March 2013 to July 2015 (2 years 5 months) Senior Software Engineer @ I designed, implemented, and/or enhanced a number of critical infrastructure and back-end systems that helped launch Rift in 2011. These include a crash handling service, a monitoring service to detect and restart crashed server processes, a game event logging infrastructure and log search tool. In addition, I contributed to scalability testing, and the development of server administration and customer service tools. After the initial launch of Rift, I supported our expansion internationally by architecting a framework that enabled Rift to integrate with the authentication and billing systems of our international partners in Russia, Korea, Taiwan, and China. The key challenge here was to present a single consistent API to the Rift code while abstracting away the highly divergent implementation details of each partner's product. From April 2009 to December 2012 (3 years 9 months) Austin, Texas AreaPrincipal Software Engineer @ I demoted myself from Lead Programmer to this position, because I wanted to get back to hands-on problem solving for a while. I'm sure I'll want to be in a leadership role again someday, but right now I'm having fun. Part of that fun is that I got to choose and train my successor. It was a great experience for both of us, and it has caused me to look at my performance and decisions as a Lead from a different (and enlightening) perspective. Now, my work is focused on solving some of the bigger problems with our technical infrastructure, especially related to our development process and tools, our content pipeline, and publishing. It's a great set of challenges, and it permits me to combine the big-picture perspective I gained as Lead Programmer with my technical knowledge of the project to hopefully really do some good for our team and product. From July 2008 to February 2009 (8 months) Lead Programmer @ As the technical leader of the Tabula Rasa programming team, my job was to do whatever it took to enable my team to succeed. This included strategic technical planning, architecture and technical design guidance, development process improvement, as well as mentoring and personal development. By far, the best part was when I got to work one-on-one with programmers to solve technical problems or create something really cool. From July 2004 to July 2008 (4 years 1 month) Senior Programmer @ Generalist game programmer on the Tabula Rasa project. I was responsible for a broad range of systems, including the game scripting and event messaging framework, interactive game objects and building blocks, game script editing and code generation tools, collision detection, the automated build process, unit testing framework, etc. From July 2001 to July 2004 (3 years 1 month) Game Programmer @ Implemented item and inventory game systems in Python and C++ for the Ultima Online 2 MMO project (cancelled). From November 1999 to July 2001 (1 year 9 months) Austin, Texas AreaSoftware Engineer / Technical Lead @ Implemented a UNIX framework in C++ for enabling web products to access the LEXIS-NEXIS online databases. Led development of vertical market web search products implemented on Windows NT using Microsoft web technologies. From 1996 to 1999 (3 years) Dayton, Ohio AreaApplication Consultant / Business Systems Consultant / Associate Admin Manager @ From 1988 to 1995 (7 years) BA, Finance, Real Estate, English @ The University of Texas at Austin From 1982 to 1987 n/a, Computer Science, 4.0/4.0 @ University of Dayton From 1992 to 1999 Matthew Walker is skilled in: Game Development, MMO, Multiplayer, Online Gaming, Distributed Systems, Server Architecture, Client/server, C++, C#, Java, Python, Scala, Bash, Akka, Continuous Integration