Matthew Hinman
Principal Software Engineer II at Elastic
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Hinman is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building and leading work on distributed systems, currently driving core Elasticsearch development and Index Lifecycle Management at Elastic. He brings deep backend expertise in Java and Clojure, a history of performance and concurrency improvements in Elasticsearch, and hands-on DevOps sensibilities from shipping production-grade search infrastructure. An active open-source contributor, Matthew has improved projects ranging from the Node.js Matrix IRC bridge to the widely used Cheshire Clojure JSON library and key parts of Leiningen. He is known for meticulous code quality, pragmatic refactors, and shipping robust fixes—often surfacing in subtle but critical areas like ILM edge cases and transport-timeout logging. Based in Denver, he pairs technical leadership with ongoing community engagement, preferring to release most extracurricular work as open source.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder
Stackoverflow
5,187reputation
591kreached
30answers
3questions
highlight
top-1%
elasticsearch
top-5%
vim
top-5%
Github Skills (36)
dependency-management10
json10
javascript10
clojure-cli10
amazon-elasticsearch10
java10
clojure10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
api10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
build-tools10
nodejs10
elasticsearch-api10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
dakrone/cheshire
Mar 2011 - Nov 2022
Clojure JSON and JSON SMILE (binary json format) encoding/decoding
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 404 commits, 70 PRs in 11 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the Clojure-based JSON encoding and decoding library. Their work involved updating dependencies from clj-json, refactoring code, implementing new features, and improving the overall functionality of the library. Specific tasks included encoding and decoding of data types like sets, symbols, dates, and byte arrays. Furthermore, the user made modifications to support better stream parsing and added functionalities helpful for users familiar with the clojure-json library.
clojure
elastic/elasticsearch
Dec 2011 - Jan 2023
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1660 reviews, 2111 commits, 2073 PRs in 11 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Matthew's commits focus on enhancing the Elasticsearch core, specifically within the context of Index Lifecycle Management (ILM). The user implemented features such as making force merges "best effort" in ILM and ensuring that index operations are handled during node replacement. The user also made various fixes for the ILM APIs, addressing potential NullPointerExceptions and ensuring correct behavior for actions such as deleting data streams. In addition, the user worked on performance-related code and code quality improvements, adding better logging for timed-out transport requests and modifying code for thread safety and improved concurrency.
restrestfulsearch-engineelasticsearchjava
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.