Matthew Nielsen
Senior Software Engineer at Deseret Book
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Nielsen is a senior software engineer with 15 years of experience building and modernizing high-throughput backend systems, currently architecting the APIs and infrastructure that deliver eBooks, audiobooks, and subscription services at Deseret Book. He migrated legacy Ruby/Rails stacks to modern versions and AWS, scaled throughput from ~200 to 4,000+ requests per minute, and decoupled services to improve resilience while adding features like annotations and ElasticSearch-powered search. An early web entrepreneur who founded and scaled Quizilla.com (sold to Gorilla Nation/Viacom), he brings hands-on ops, performance tuning, and product empathy to every project. Matthew is also an active open-source contributor in the Ruby ecosystem—he refactored FFaker to support deterministic RNG for reliable tests—and has a history of shipping pragmatic tooling and libraries that simplify deployment and content workflows.
15 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Viewmont High School
Japanese, German, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (8)
unit-testing10
randomization10
refactoring10
refactor10
test-automation10
ruby10
rspec6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
ffaker/ffaker
Jul 2016 - Apr 2022
Faker refactored.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:40 commits, 3 PRs, 5 comments in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Matthew significantly refactored the codebase to incorporate a repeatable Random Number Generator (RNG) for deterministic behavior within the FFaker library. They introduced the `Random` module and integrated it into the `ModuleUtils` for methods like `fetch`, `shuffle`, and `rand`. Furthermore, the user added helper methods and tests to ensure the determinism of various FFaker module methods. The user converted several modules to use the internal RNG, expanding its scope.
testingrefactoredfaker
xunker/uci
Jan 2013 - Dec 2014
Contributions:25 commits in 1 year 11 months
ucirubyruby-libraryuniversal-chess-interfaceengines
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