Matt Stauffer
CEO at Tighten
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Stauffer is a seasoned software leader and CEO of Tighten with 14+ years of experience building and rescuing web applications and development teams. He blends hands-on engineering—contributing to core Laravel projects like Valet and the framework, and maintaining Tighten tools such as Jigsaw, Ziggy, and Takeout—with empathetic technical leadership that scales healthy, productive teams. An author and educator, he wrote O'Reilly's "Laravel: Up and Running" and hosts two podcasts that bridge technical craft and the business of developer work. His background includes founding startups, leading engineering teams, and shipping developer tooling that improves local and static-site workflows, reflecting a rare mix of product, ops, and community impact.
14 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor, English, Bachelor, English at University of Florida
German
Stackoverflow
2,724reputation
348kreached
50answers
4questions
css
top-5%
Github Skills (47)
url-routing10
javascript10
docker10
eloquent10
static-site-generator10
laravel-mix10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
laravel10
dockers10
php10
routes10
command-line10
relational-databases10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
tighten/takeout
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Docker-based development-only dependency manager. macOS, Linux, and WSL2-only and installs via PHP's Composer... for now.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:42 releases, 66 reviews, 335 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributed to the Takeout project by building the core functionality for installing and managing development dependencies using Docker. Their commits reveal the initial structure for an `installpackage` command, along with the creation of associated classes and services like `InstallCommand`, `InstallPackage`, and `BasePackage`. Further commits added a CLI menu for package selection and integrated the package installation process.
dependency-managerdockerlinuxmacosphp
tighten/collect
May 2016 - Jan 2023
A Collections-only split from Laravel's Illuminate Support
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:50 releases, 4 reviews, 171 commits in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily focused on updating the project's dependencies and integrating tests, indicating a role in maintaining and improving the codebase. They added a helper function, `dd()`, which is a debugging tool. This user also merged a branch for fixing the dumper and moved the project to the Tightenco\Collect namespace, demonstrating skills in code maintenance, debugging, and refactoring.
laravelilluminate-collections
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