Matt Brown
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Slack
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Brown is a Senior Staff Software Engineer based in New York with 11 years of experience building developer tools and backend systems, currently shaping platform work at Slack. He has deep expertise in PHP static analysis and tooling, having been a primary contributor and maintainer around Psalm and related projects like PHP-Parser, Phan, and Symplify. At Vimeo he progressed from application engineer to Principal Engineer for Developer Experience, driving developer productivity and type-safety improvements across large codebases. Matt’s contributions frequently focus on type systems, parsers, and reducing technical debt through rigorous static analysis, refactoring, and test-suite improvements. Beyond engineering leadership, he ships practical OSS fixes that tighten type handling and improve maintainability in widely used projects such as PHPUnit and ProxyManager. His background—including a Computer Science BA from Cambridge and early experience in disciplined team settings like choral ensembles—reflects both technical rigor and collaborative attention to detail.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at University of Cambridge
the queen's english
Github Skills (37)
oop10
parserator10
static-code-analysis10
static-analysis10
parser10
mstest10
analyzer10
testing10
psr-1110
reflection-api10
aop10
proxy10
type-safety10
teste10
sa10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
vimeo/psalm
Jan 2016 - Jan 2023
A PHP static analysis tool for finding errors and security vulnerabilities in PHP applications
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:348 releases, 77 reviews, 8121 commits in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Matt contributed to the PHP static analysis tool, Psalm. Their work focused on implementing new features, such as adding support for `int-mask` and `int-mask-of` types to the type parser and integrating the checking of attribute targets and type information. They also addressed bugs related to incorrect targeting and performed code refactoring.
security-analysisfindingphptaint-analysisphp-applications
nikic/PHP-Parser
Oct 2016 - Oct 2018
A PHP parser written in PHP
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 12 PRs, 49 comments in 2 years
Contributions summary:Matt contributed to the PHP parser by fixing issues reported by Psalm, such as adding non-void return types and fixing type hints. They improved code quality through doc comments and removed unused variables. Their work involved modifying the parser's abstract classes and core functionalities to ensure correct type handling and overall code correctness.
sql-parserphpstatic-code-analysisastabstract-syntax-tree
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