Matthew Macpherson
CTO (Chief Technical Octopus) at Octopus Think
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
RockstarMatthew Macpherson is a pragmatic CTO and hands-on full‑stack engineer with 17 years of experience building web apps, developer tooling, and polished front-end experiences from Edinburgh. As Chief Technical Octopus at Octopus Think he combines strategic leadership with regular coding, shipping apps and improving developer flows rather than managing from afar. His open-source footprint includes meaningful contributions to high-profile projects like Mozilla’s add-ons ecosystem, WordPress Gutenberg and localForage, spanning frontend, backend and testing improvements. He has deep experience refactoring UI, implementing storage drivers, and hardening test suites—skills honed during seven years at Mozilla and a stint leading releases at Automattic. Comfortable moving between JS, PHP and Python ecosystems, he has a knack for fixing thorny UX and compatibility issues that others sidestep. Colleagues would note he balances playful job titles with disciplined engineering and a track record of shipping reliable, user-focused systems.
17 years of coding experience
Github Skills (31)
localstorage10
json-parser10
json10
javascript10
sinon10
es6-promise10
testing10
css10
wordpress10
jsonp10
templater10
template-engine10
redux10
phpunit10
parsing10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
localForage/localForage
Apr 2013 - Oct 2021
💾 Offline storage, improved. Wraps IndexedDB, WebSQL, or localStorage using a simple but powerful API.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 3 reviews, 710 commits in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the development of a local storage library. Their work involved the implementation of multiple drivers for data storage, including IndexedDB, WebSQL, and localStorage. Key commits centered on adding core API methods such as `getItem`, `setItem`, `removeItem`, and `clear`, along with supporting utilities. The user also worked on web worker support for background tasks, illustrating a focus on optimizing the library for different environments.
apioffline-storageimprovedindexeddbwraps
mozilla/addons-frontend
Feb 2016 - Apr 2018
Front-end to complement mozilla/addons-server
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 980 commits, 1157 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily focused on updating the front-end application by renaming app components, files and refactoring code. The commits involve modifying React components, and refactoring the redux store. The user was also responsible for implementing the search results page and various other parts of the admin features.
reactaddonsreduxaddoncomplement
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