Matthew Ford
CEO CTO And Co-Founder at Bit Zesty
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Ford is a seasoned technology leader and co-founder who has spent 16 years building and running Bit Zesty, a London-based digital agency focused on Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, JavaScript, and React Native. He combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership, recruiting and growing multidisciplinary teams that deliver accessible, service-designed products for startups, charities, government and enterprise clients. His secondment to the UK Government Digital Service saw him architect and build parts of GOV.UK—including the Trade Tariff and publishing tools—demonstrating experience on high-traffic, mission-critical platforms. An active contributor to open-source projects like Whitehall and Sidekiq, he balances backend engineering and deployment/DevOps improvements with pragmatic product delivery. Matt holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of York and an MSc in Management of Software Projects, reflecting both technical depth and delivery-focused management. He’s known for translating complex public-sector requirements into secure, usable digital services while maintaining a startup’s speed and adaptability.
17 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Management of Software Projects, MSc Management of Software Projects at The Open UniversityBSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at University of York
Stackoverflow
2,918reputation
252kreached
109answers
14questions
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
admin10
capistrano10
rails10
sidekiq10
ruby10
admin-interface10
devops10
ruby-on-rails10
background-process9
background-worker9
background-processing9
database-design9
background-task9
activerecord9
minitest8
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
alphagov/whitehall
Dec 2012 - Mar 2014
Publishes government content on GOV.UK
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:701 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Matthew appears to be primarily focused on back-end development within this repository. Their commits involve modifications to the administration interface and the addition of features related to managing and displaying data, as evidenced by changes to controllers, models, and views. The contributions include refactoring, integrating features such as showing and updating a summary or body for content, and enabling date filtering. Furthermore, there were modifications to allow the implementation of a more robust search functionality, and integrating additional information.
govgovuk-publishing-frontendgovukgovernmentcontainer
sidekiq/sidekiq
Mar 2012 - Apr 2012
Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:5 commits, 2 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Matthew's contributions primarily focused on improving the deployment and management of the Sidekiq application. They fixed issues related to directory creation for logging and ensured the correct execution of Capistrano tasks. The user also modified Capistrano hooks for starting, stopping, and restarting the Sidekiq service. Furthermore, they addressed issues related to the execution of Capistrano tasks.
background-processingrubysidekiqbackground-jobsjobs
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