Matt Hamer

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

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Attribyte

Attribyte Delivers the News, Not Noise

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.

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Gawker Media

100 Million Monthly Readers

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.

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Kinja

Weblog of Weblogs

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.

Meet the Bloggers

Blogger

Push-Button Publishing for the People

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

The New Gawker Media
– Felix Salmon, 2010

Say Everything
–Scott Rosenberg, 2010