Matthew Conlen
Co-Founder at realtime.org
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Conlen is a computer scientist, data journalist, and co-founder based in New York with 14 years of experience building interactive data products and storytelling tools. He blends research-grade HCI and visualization expertise from a UW PhD with newsroom rigor from roles at The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight, and product leadership at Our World in Data. As a hands-on engineer he has contributed full-stack and backend code to prominent open-source visualization projects (including work on the widely used owid-grapher platform and real-time websocket-backed visualization servers). He builds tools that make complex data explorable and publishable, with a particular interest in interactive documents for expository writing. His background spans academia, startups, and consultancy, giving him a rare mix of research depth and production-focused delivery. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic designer-engineer who turns analytical rigor into clear visual narratives.
14 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of WashingtonBachelor of Science (B.S.), Applied Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Applied Mathematics at University of Michigan
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
nodejs10
react10
expressjs9
typescript9
websocket9
data-modeling9
typescript-types9
front-end-development9
typescripts9
data-visualization8
data-visualisation8
mongoose8
json8
data-visualizations8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
lightning-viz/lightning
Jul 2014 - Oct 2016
Data Visualization Server
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:676 commits, 23 PRs, 348 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Matthew's commits primarily involved implementing data models and real-time updating features for a data visualization server. The user introduced new model schemas for data and visualizations and integrated them into the application's controllers. They also modified the Express.js configuration to include middleware for connection slashes, and added code to support dynamic data appending via websocket to the front end.
data-visualizationvisualization-servervisualization
owid/owid-grapher
Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
A platform for creating interactive data visualizations
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 74 commits, 14 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Matthew contributed to the integration of Google Docs within the platform, as well as the removal of debug statements. Their work primarily involved modifications to the frontend components, specifically within the `site/gdocs` directory. Additional changes were made to the `adminSiteServer` and `baker` directories, indicating involvement across different parts of the application. The user also made various code style improvements.
graph-analysisreactmemgraphgraphsvisualizations
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