Matt Hamer
Hello. I'm Matt Hamer. I've been producing software for over twenty years. For the past fifteen, I've helped teams create publishing systems, databases, crawlers and search indexes for popular sites like Gizmodo, Deadspin and Blogger. In 1999, I developed Weavelet, one of the first web-based feed readers. A few years later, I helped launch another aggregator, Kinja. Twelve years ago, I started building Attribyte with the idea that search technology combined with algorithmic recommendation could help readers create their own personalized digests without requiring them to find, curate and follow a large list of feeds.
Recent Projects
Attribyte
In 2015, we launched a native Android app and a web application optimized for mobile devices. Both run on Attribyte's search platform and API. Attribyte also relies on a distributed crawler, an on-demand image processing system and a number of open-source projects that I've developed.
Gawker Media
I was part of Gawker Media's tech team when it was created and helped it grow from a couple of people to over twenty. For ten years, I was deeply involved in the architecture and production of Gawker's custom publishing, search, stats and discussion systems.
Kinja
Long before Gawker Media had a conversation system using the name, Kinja existed as a web-based blog reader. My first assignment was to build a parser to extract blog posts directly from HTML pages. Later, I redesigned Kinja's parsing and crawling framework. Finally, I became the project manager until the site was shut down and acquired by Gawker Media.
Blogger
Along with Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, Paul Bausch, Matt Haughey, "B" designer Derek Powazek and Jack Saturn, I was one of the original developers of Blogger, created by Pyra and now owned by Google. The architecture required to support a popular site has changed a lot since then as you can see on my diagram of Blogger's hardware as it was when I worked on it, circa 2000.
Select Vanity-Search Results
Expanding Play to a Multiple JVM
Architecture
–Ping Conference, 2014
Gawker's Kinja, circa 2003
–Jason Kottke, 2012
The New Gawker
Media
– Felix Salmon, 2010
Say Everything
–Scott Rosenberg, 2010
Getting Real: Race to
Running Software
–37signals, 2005
How the Blogger Deal Happened (Trellix, not
Google!)
–Dan Bricklin, 2001
This is what computers looked like when we
first
made Blogger
–Evan Williams, 2000