Matthew Kerwin
Full Stack Developer at Queensland University of Technology
Queensland, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Kerwin is a seasoned full stack developer with 14+ years building and maintaining web- and networked digital repository systems for universities and research institutions. He combines hands-on coding in Ruby, PHP, Perl, JavaScript and C with systems-level experience (HTTP/TLS, MySQL, service management) and a practiced eye for improving development and support workflows. At QUT he’s delivered front-end and API work, triaged incidents across tiered support, mentored engineers and even stepped into acting team-lead roles, reflecting an emerging leadership trajectory. An active open-source contributor, he’s patched core JRuby behaviors and optimized the widely used Addressable URI library, demonstrating deep attention to standards and interoperability through IETF involvement. Curious by nature and comfortable with low-level systems (nasm/x86, JVM internals) as well as high-level web stacks, he brings a pragmatic blend of research-minded engineering and operational reliability.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Mareeba State High SchoolBachelor of Science (Honours), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (Honours), Computer Science at James Cook University
Stackoverflow
3,811reputation
704kreached
33answers
3questions
css
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rest
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jax-rs
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http
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html
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Github Skills (30)
jvm10
regex10
ruby10
optmization10
performance-optimization10
optimisation10
uri10
optimization10
performance-monitor9
java9
css9
http9
rest9
performance-analysis9
javas9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
jruby/jruby
Dec 2014 - Nov 2016
JRuby, an implementation of Ruby on the JVM
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 3 PRs, 18 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the `jruby/jruby` repository by implementing and enhancing core Ruby language features within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) implementation. Their work involved adding new methods to core Ruby classes like `Enumerable` and `Array` to match MRI behavior. They also addressed specific bugs related to symbol encoding and floating-point arithmetic within the Ruby implementation, optimizing for numerical precision.
ruby-languageconcurrencyrubyjvmperformance
sporkmonger/addressable
Nov 2017 - Mar 2018
Addressable is an alternative implementation to the URI implementation that is part of Ruby's standard library. It is flexible, offers heuristic parsing, and additionally provides extensive support for IRIs and URI templates.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 3 PRs, 3 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily focused on refactoring and optimizing the `addressable` library's code. Their work involved replacing redundant `gsub` calls with `sub`, which suggests efforts to improve performance. Furthermore, the user implemented and refined heuristic parsing for various file URI formats, including handling UNC/SMB shares and correcting parsing of "file://" URLs. They also addressed case-sensitivity issues and removed unnecessary regex repetitions.
heuristicaddressableuri-templateuriruby
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