Matthew
Hudson

• Minnesota Star Tribune rebrand & replatform: Directed ~30 engineers, PMs, and designers across time zones to migrate to Next.js on Vercel. Outcome: publisher-reported +35% YoY digital subscription growth following redesign; unified mobile/web codebases improved iteration speed.
• RealClearMedia rebrand & replatform: Leading company-wide modernization onto Next.js/Vercel/PayloadCMS to streamline development and editorial workflows.
• RealClearPolling: Migrated from legacy PHP to Contentful + Next.js/Vercel; instituted Lighthouse/SpeedCurve CI gates. Outcome: Core Web Vitals 80–90+, higher deploy confidence, resilience ahead of 2024 election traffic.
• AI PubTech initiative: Partnering with newsroom editors to design a next-generation white-label CMS augmented with AI. Goal: shorter time-to-delivery and reduced manual work, with enhancements that feel natural to editors’ existing workflows.
• Context Lens: Contributor on an AI-driven contextual graphics system to automatically narrativize data for newsrooms.

• Led Next.js/React platform for patient care navigation on a >$100M-funded company (investors include NEA, Lux, Goodwater, Horizon Blue Cross, Susquehanna).
• Implemented design system + CI quality gates (Storybook, ESLint, Sonar). Outcome: cut UI delivery cycle ~40% and lifted patient engagement ~25%.

• Managed managers, led a geographically dispersed team of 25-30 engineers responsible for: Bon Appétit, Traveler, Epicurious, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.
• Vanity Fair ‘Trump tweet’ response: operationalized rapid technical response to convert a spike into revenue, 13,000 new subs in 24 hours (a ~100x day and a CN record).
• Drove VF page performance from ~25 → 80–90 PageSpeed; supported YoY paid‑sub growth across brands via coordinated paywall + perf work, tripling paid subs YOY.
• Orchestrated internal web performance efforts, disseminating learnings department-wide, achieving a 25% improvement across brands.

• Kandu (kids app creator): Led eng through $2.4M betaworks-led seed round; shipped iPad no-code creation experience.
• AlphaWorks (equity crowdfunding): Stabilized engineering through leadership transition; platform launched with co-investment from Founder Collective, OATV, Box Group and early syndication with SV Angel, Lerer Ventures.

• Early engineer at a startup that scaled into a unicorn (>$1B valuation, IPO via SPAC in 2022); joined at ~10 employees and built core features as the company grew rapidly.
• Developed major front-end systems for seat maps, event discovery, and checkout UX, directly impacting conversion during high-traffic events.
• Co-developed Sixpack, an open-source A/B testing framework that became widely adopted beyond SeatGeek and remains a well-known experimentation tool in the developer community.

Star Tribune digital subscriptions +35% YoY

Vanity Fair’s 13,000 new subscribers in 24 hours

RealClearPolling modernization (Next.js, Contentful)

How Condé Nast Used Node.js to Unify Brands, Create Customer Faith