Matt 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
Examples of using each Illuminate component in non-Laravel applications
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:9 reviews, 207 commits, 90 PRs in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Matt contributed to the development of non-Laravel examples using Illuminate components, demonstrating a focus on backend and some frontend integration. Their work involved setting up database connections using Eloquent, implementing caching mechanisms, and creating routing examples. They also worked on the configuration of the application, including setting up the session and integrating with the view component.
A more enjoyable local development experience for Mac.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:81 releases, 42 reviews, 437 commits in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributed to the Valet project by adding functionality, specifically the "trust" command. This feature allows users to add sudoers files, making Valet commands run without passwords. The user's changes involved modifying the command-line interface and core PHP files, along with tests demonstrating their integration. Furthermore, the user was involved in minor version updates indicating a responsibility for project maintenance and possibly contributing to deployment processes.
vagrantlocal-developmentphpmactrellis
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