Matthew Hooker
Senior Software Engineer SRE Team Lead at Weights & Biases
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarMatthew Hooker is a Senior Software Engineer and SRE Team Lead with 17 years of experience building reliable, large-scale infrastructure and developer tools from the trenches of San Francisco. He has led technical direction at HashiCorp (Packer, Terraform Cloud) and now guides SRE practices at Weights & Biases, blending hands-on systems engineering with team leadership. His background spans distributed systems, Kafka-based streaming, immutable infrastructure, and cloud-native operations—skills honed across companies from DISQUS and Simple Finance to Wercker and Digg. An active open-source contributor, he improved resilience in widely used projects such as a Go AWS library and the pykafka client, including sophisticated retry and rebalancing logic that hardens networking and consumer behavior. Colleagues rely on him to turn complex distributed problems into tested, production-grade solutions and to shepherd open-source communities through technical change. He pairs deep protocol-level knowledge with practical DevOps instincts, often surfacing small infrastructure changes that yield outsized reliability gains.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (21)
python10
http10
kafka10
zookeeper10
terraform10
terraform-provider10
terraformer10
http-client10
go10
aws10
retry-logic10
nethttp10
error-handling10
apache-kafka10
terraform-cloud9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
Parsely/pykafka
Jul 2012 - May 2013
Apache Kafka client for Python; high-level & low-level consumer/producer, with great performance.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:205 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the development of a Kafka client for Python. Their work involved the initial implementation of consumer features, including core logic for consumer group management and partition assignment, demonstrating their focus on the underlying Kafka protocol and consumer behavior. The user also implemented and refined the rebalancing algorithm, essential for efficient consumer group operation. Additionally, they focused on offset management, enabling tracking of consumed messages.
sinkapache-kafkapythonhigh-levelapache
mitchellh/goamz
Nov 2013 - Dec 2013
Golang Amazon Library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the `goamz` repository by adding and improving the retry logic for HTTP client requests within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) library. They implemented a resilient transport layer with retry mechanisms, including backoff strategies and custom retry predicates, to handle temporary network errors and 5xx HTTP status codes. These changes involved modifying the `aws/client.go`, `ec2/ec2.go`, and `iam/iam.go` files to incorporate the new client and retry functionality. Furthermore, the user updated test cases within `aws/client_test.go` to validate the retry mechanism.
golangamazonaws
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