Mat Martin Joins GiraffeSoft!

Mat has been a staple at Montreal on Rails since day one. Hanging out with him was always fun; we had a ton of interesting conversations. Whether we were discussing testing frameworks, or debating the latest raganwald post, chatting with Mat was always interesting, and fun. We hung out a lot at CUSEC, which is when Mat told me about his C# job — he wasn't... ummm.... loving it. That's when I started devising my plan to hire him, but alas, it wasn't time. Fast forward a couple of months, and finally, it is time!

But, enough about me, here are some fun facts about Mat.

• Mat is a language geek. His presentations at MoR have been about JRuby, and rubinius. He can often be found reading Steve Yegge, and Raganwald. Don't be surprised if Mat leaves GiraffeSoft at some point in the future to escape from "ruby hell" for the purity of lisp.
• Mat *really* loves testing. ...so much that at a former job where testing wasn't part of the culture, Mat wrote his code test first, and then trashed the tests when he checked in his code, since he wasn't allowed to check them in. He'll fit right in here :).

What Mat'll be Working On

As far as client work is concerned, Mat will be working on a couple of stealth mode projects that we'll hopefully be able to blog about in a couple of months. Client work, however, will only account for around 50% of Mat's time. So, what about the other half?

I'm going to try something totally crazy: 50% time. Yeah, that's right, fifty percent time, 5-0 — eat your heart out, google. Mat will have half his time to work on whatever he wants. He may use his time for blogging, working on Giraffetyp projects, open source, or developing some of his own ideas. Investing time and effort in some of my ideas, and open source projects has been a huge win for my skill set, and profile, and I'm taking a serious bet that it'll do the same for Mat.

So, Look Out

Mat has already proven himself to be a great blogger, and launched his first open source project. Nearly every article he's written over the last few months has been featured on programming reddit, hacker news, etc. His first open source project even got a shout outs from the github blog, and the rails envy podcast. Armed with ample time every week to work on that stuff, I'm betting Mat will become a prominent figure in the community in no time.

Here's what Mat has to Mat has to say about his move.