I'm Matt Hoskison. Hi!
I'm an experienced senior backend web developer, devops, sysadmin & team lead.
I was recently fortunate to be able to take some time out to spend with family and to enjoy the rare opportunity of working on personal projects, and I’m now back in the “open to interesting challenges” stage of my life.
It’s been an amazing experience so far - I’ve built software to help new businesses manage their growth, for logistics and warehousing staff to (entirely legally) increase their take-home pay; I’ve built systems that manage a complex hierarchy of infrastructure deployments and along the way I’ve managed a large Salesforce environment with its outsourced team of developers.
I’ve run projects with tax experts, lawyers, marketeers and network engineers and set up and managed systems and processes to plan and coordinate updates to a small corner of our critical national infrastructure. As Head of Software Engineering I’ve recruited and mentored juniors and taught them as much as they could absorb about dev, infra, devops, best practice, professional standards and ethics, and successfully delivered projects which improve customer acquisition and retention - and now and again I do bog standard web dev too!
I’m proud of the the teams I’ve built, the amazing people I’ve worked with and the solutions I’ve delivered.
But what comes next?
If you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager with an interesting project, request my CV or contact me and let me know!
For a backend web developer (that’s me), the beauty of a web site is the part that few people ever see: The code. The database schema. The infrastructure that glues it all together and gives the code somewhere to live, and to do something useful (where usefulness, like beauty, are concepts of the beholder’s eye). The beauty is the elegant solution to a tricky programming problem. The beauty is a class of well structured and aesthetically pleasing methods. The beauty of code as an art form that few appreciate and will never be presented in a gallery.
So no - web design isn’t my thing, and this web site will - obviously - never win design awards. Watch me shrug while I make another cup of coffee.
I’m driven by the intellectual challenge of problem solving. I’m a creator of code, and an artist of ideas expressed in that code.
Other stuff I’ve done
I’m a bit of an aviation geek, and highlights (so far!) include actual hands-on flying of an F-15 Eagle around Mt McKinley in Alaska, I’ve sat in the cockpit of XH558 (IYKYK) and jumped out of other perfectly serviceable aircraft (not the F-15) for “fun”. I’ve been onboard a NATO E-3A whilst it controlled the intercept of a Russkie Bear and I’ve learned to fly a glider. Next on my bucket list is to learn to fly a helicopter - after lots of practice I can now do it pretty well in XPlane; I wonder if that would be a help or a hindrance in the real thing?
I’m … getting better, shall we say … in Blender, and dabble a little in video editing in KdenLive. All of this is done on KDE, which I’ve been using since around V3.
Some other personal highlights:
Volunteer crewmember on the RNLI’s Flamborough Lifeboat
BBC Look North did a feature on us and included a couple of clips of us manoeuvering in the bay in their opening title sequence. After various house moves and HD upgrades this screen cap is annoyingly now the only photo I have of 10 years of service to the RNLI.
I’m sadly no longer involved, but I’m proud of my association with the RNLI and my part in numerous vessels assisted and lives saved. Its volunteers represent the best of us: courage, selflessness, dedication. I judge a person harshly who claims otherwise.
My IT Manager days
From its head office in Manchester, I ran the IT department, infrastructure and IT support/helpdesk for a £50m turnover recruitment business with offices along the M62 corridor, along with Paul, Jimmy, and of course Azlin.
I was thrust into the role of IT Manager (and later IT Director) by an extremely supportive and forward thinking MD, from whom I learned so much about the world of business - and fish’n’chips - beyond my own world of massively bloated printer drivers (you know what I’m talking about, HP), user accounts, cables and blinkenlights. Cheers Danny!
I built the network literally from the ground up - everything from running and terminating CAT5 cables to setting up and managing an Active Directory domain across multiple remote offices. Running on-prem Exchange and multi-branch SQL Server replication, VPNs, BES, and Citrix, and supporting the Payroll team to meet the Wednesday 9pm BACS deadline, this was a fun time!