Matthew Lyon
Principal Engineer at Square Hammer Labs
Olympia, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Lyon is a Principal Engineer with 18 years of experience who excels at untangling semantically complex problems and shipping full-stack solutions that make complex data and behavioral systems more understandable. He has led engineering efforts at companies including Salesforce and Embed and currently drives technical direction at Square Hammer Labs while consulting on user interaction and data semantics. Matthew blends embedded systems and backend expertise—contributing to projects like QMK firmware and a high-level CouchDB Node client—with research-driven interface design to improve developer tooling. His background in fine and studio arts informs a creative approach to sound design and music releases, bringing a multidisciplinary sensibility to technical product problems. Notably, he pairs pragmatic engineering (streaming attachment support, footnote parsing) with hands-on custom hardware work, showing comfort across firmware, server-side architecture, and UX for complex domains. Based in Olympia, WA, he balances commercial engineering leadership with independent artistic practice and open-source contributions.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Fine and Studio Arts, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Fine and Studio Arts at UC Santa Barbara
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
447reached
2answers
2questions
Github Skills (43)
markdown10
api-rest10
couchdb10
c-language10
api-design10
elixir10
restful-api10
qmk-firmware10
firmware10
qmk10
c-programming10
c1110
keymaps10
c1710
keyboard-layout10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
qmk/qmk_firmware
Dec 2018 - Sep 2020
Open-source keyboard firmware for Atmel AVR and Arm USB families
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 2 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the creation of a custom keyboard firmware, demonstrated by the development and modification of keymaps for the Planck and Iris keyboards. These changes involved defining keyboard layouts, implementing custom key combinations, and integrating audio features. The contributions also included configuration files to enable features like MIDI and RGB lighting. The user appears to be focused on customizing and extending the functionality of keyboards based on the QMK firmware.
rp2040firmwareavratmelkeyboard-support
flatiron/cradle
Apr 2010 - Apr 2010
a high-level CouchDB client for Node.js
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits in 5 days
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily focused on enhancing the attachment functionality within the CouchDB client. They implemented basic PUT support for attachments, enabling the storage of data. Further contributions included adding streaming support for uploading attachments and enabling retrieval of attachments via a GET request. They also addressed caching behavior related to attachment updates.
couchdb-clientnode-jsjavascripthigh-levelnodejs
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