Matt Gould

Online dating is an amazing tool but often it feels like the tool is misapplied. Which is where Spicy Dating comes from. We want to make online dating great for everyone. There are 3 key areas that we can improve on firstly, the relevancy of matches. We want to help people find the best matches for themselves and often that means getting rid of overly complex algorithms. We use a relevancy based algorithm using OpenSearch. Secondly is communication. We want to help people connect globally and that means bridging a language barrier. Lastly is cost. Online dating is seriously expensive, almost to the point that it seems like a scam. We want to remove the majority of the cost for people genuinely looking to form relationships.

DatHuis is an automation tool for the Dutch real estate market. It's aimed at real estate agents to help them manage their leads. During my time with DatHuis I worked on the backend architecture using AWS and Serverless Framework. It was at DatHuis that I realized the power of serverless technologies like DynamoDB, Lambda and a lot more. The funnest part of working with DatHuis was getting the chance to work with ElasticSearch. I contributed quite a large amount to the ElasticSearch architecture. In the end we were able to have full typescript support based on index mappings (which is totally awesome), automated deployments, with automated index updates and re-indexing.

Saavu is an events management solution. I joined Saavu in November 2018. Working with Saavu was awesome, I had a lot of freedom to choose technologies and learn new skills like setting up CI/CD deployments and learning from some amazingly talented Frontend developers. On a day to day basis we used the following technologies: NodeJS (Express), PostGres, AWS (Zeit), Docker and NuxtJS.

SailChecker is a yacht charter booking platform. I joined the SailChecker team in early August 2017. My role with SailChecker was to build an integration with multiple third party APIs to get the widest service area and best prices for our customers. The technologies we used to complete the integrations were PHP, NodeJS (AdonisJS), MySQL, AWS, Docker, Tensorflow and NuxtJS (VueJS SSR Framework).

Dental Departures is a travel agency for dental and medical tourism. It turns out that you can travel to countries like Mexico, Thailand and Indonesia to have treatments that are of the quality you would expect from the US and Europe but at a fraction of the cost. It's a win win you get a once in a life time holiday and expert dental and medical care. During my time with Dental Departures, I worked on improving the customer search - helping customers find the right dentists. Second to that was creating an in-house analytics program to workout the cost of a lead and the expected value of a lead at any given point of time.

My role with E-Commerce workroom was "web developer" however my role was a lot more varied and I ended up doing various projects which involved the web, mobile and embedded engineering. I worked with E-Commerce workroom part time for several years. I loved working on projects with E-Commerce workroom because I'd usually be getting paid to learn new skills :).

ITMarine Ltd is a communication service for ship brokerage companies. I joined ITM Ltd with a short term contract to build a REST API in PHP. The goal of this API was to intake market data from various sources and provide close to real time aggregation of the different sources. The API had to be designed in such a way that it could be consumed by many frontend clients including Java, web and mobile.

I joined South Eastern Box Sash Windows to create a network of WordPress websites. The goal was to create a template that would enable us to create a new website with ease. We wanted to be able to start a Digital Ocean droplet and run a single command to setup our desired WP configuration (themes and plugins). We achieved the functionality mostly through a bash script that would download resources and configure on the fly.