I’m Matthew Smith—an engineering manager and front-end web developer living in beautiful Brooklyn, New York. Through my storied career I’ve built features, pixels and clicky things for some of the world’s tiptop brands.
What I really want to do is help people tell stories.
I’m looking for roles helping people create content of all forms—written, spoken, and visual. That might be roles in social media, building tools, or content monetization.
That said, I love solving people problems for people solving code problems. I’ve led an array of engineering teams varying in size and skillsets. Projects under my leadership deploy on-time and on-budget.
Matthew Smith Builds the Snazziest Web
Content
I build things that toggle…
…things that dance…
★
…and even things that ding!
🔔
ding
But it’s not all fun and games.
Front-end sits in traffic squarely in the intersection of art and science. People might love a novel button toggle, but what they really love is discovering needed content, fast-loading sites, and working, intuitive widgets.
Fortunately, I build all that too. My stylesheets are modern poetry. My JavaScript is fast, clean, and performant. My HTML is semantic and accessible.
Accessibility
Accessibility’s a big component of the modern web. As we enable greater ranges of abilities, it’s crucial our stories be heard, seen, or felt by everyone who wants to experience them.
The magic part? Accessibility benefits everyone. Forms become more usable. Images gain more context. Video becomes easier to watch.
I’m a big, big fan of subtitles and closed captioning. At Disney Streaming, I even reintegrated the captions for ESPN+ to incorporate a variety of styles and preferences right in their proprietary video player.
There’s a lot of power built right into the browser. I rolled some custom subtitles to show you.
Matthew Smith Plays Well With Others
A great web team’s assembled with skills and experiences across a spectrum of careers. Great team members interface with all of them.
How I work with…
Project Management
I give realistic, timely estimates. I’ve written enough code to know what’s quick and what’s not and I won’t sugarcoat either side. When problems arise, you’re the first to know and I keep my updates to the point.
Quality Assurance
Bugs happen, and I’m delighted when you find mine. I write unit tests to minimize the easy bugs and I write clear acceptance criteria so we’re all on the same page for more complex features. We’ll collaborate deep to hammer out the stubborn bugs.
Product
Product’s my bridge from stakeholders to the devs I lead. Product and I set the project’s direction and the two of us know what we’re building and how. With my technical knowledge and experience I’ll help you identify technical issues in defining requirements early on so we don’t run into issues mid-dev cycle.
Stakeholders
A colleague once said of me Matthew’s basically the ultimate emcee when presenting my team’s innovations at the annual Disney Streaming summit. I translate geek into clear, succinct status updates and I’m always happy to present to a boss— or a boss’ boss.
Design
I’ve been using Photoshop longer than I’ve been building web sites. I value good typography and healthy whitespace. We’ll have plenty of discussions and helpful feedback sessions to ensure your comps get executed as envisioned. I’ll never think the logo needs to be bigger.
Digital Strategy
Mapping pages, events, and properties is a constant dance and we need solid data to not only measure, but experiment against. I’ll help you capture what needs tracking and help set up a variety of tests to ensure we’re at peak SEO and maxiumum ad dollar return.
My Three Favorite Gifs
Gifs are a modern form of storytelling. I use some in place of
responses and some as stories of their own. I leave you with my
favorite three.
