Matthew Wear
Open Source Software Engineer at LightStep
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Wear is an open source software engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in observability and distributed tracing, currently contributing at LightStep from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He’s an OpenTracing alum and a frequent contributor to the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, with substantive backend work across opentelemetry-ruby, opentelemetry-js, and the Collector that improved sampling, resource management, propagation, and error handling. His background includes senior engineering and lead roles at New Relic where he shaped Ruby agent behavior and observability features used at scale. Matthew blends deep protocol-level knowledge (trace propagation, sampling APIs) with pragmatic refactors and test-driven improvements that enhance interoperability across tooling. Collected contributions show he focuses on preserving correctness and original error semantics while extracting reusable packages and improving developer-facing docs and tests. Trained originally in mathematics education, he brings a methodical, detail-oriented approach to complex instrumentation problems.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mathematics Education, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mathematics Education at University of Illinois at Chicago
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
observability10
apidoc10
api-design10
testing10
distributed-tracing10
kafka10
opentracing10
ruby10
go10
api10
opentelemetry10
error-handling10
telemetry10
metric10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ruby
Aug 2019 - Mar 2021
OpenTelemetry Ruby API & SDK, and related gems
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:207 reviews, 51 commits, 186 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily focused on improving the OpenTelemetry Ruby API and SDK. Their work involved refactoring the resource initialization and merging logic to comply with specifications, adding tests, and enforcing string key and value types. They also implemented the sampling API, including the addition of `AlwaysSampleSampler` and `NeverSampleSampler`, new classes, and testing of the sampling process. Further contributions include the implementation of lazy events for the Span class.
opentelemetryapiapi-sdktracingruby
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js
Mar 2020 - Mar 2021
OpenTelemetry JavaScript Client
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:92 reviews, 15 commits, 23 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the development and enhancement of the Resources API within the OpenTelemetry JavaScript Client. Their work involved the creation of a dedicated package for resources, implementation of semantic conventions, and the development of associated test utilities. Furthermore, the user made improvements to documentation, resolved linting errors, and fixed test issues, ensuring the stability and maintainability of the resource management code. The commits also include updates to package licenses and the extraction of resources into their own package.
apijavascript-clientjavascripttelemetryotel
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