Matthew Hudson, Developer-at-Large

Lead a product engineering team composed on Backend, Frontend, and QA engineers focused on developing features for our primary product.

Managed managers (five directs, total team of ~25-30 engineers) across some of Condé's flagship publications; ​Bon Appétit, Traveler, Epicurious, The New Yorker, ​and Vanity Fair.​

• Effectively staffed and built diverse teams who could continue to advance our products even in my absence.
• Fostered a collaborative work environment by combating a legacy "hero culture."
• Collaborated with my counterparts to; define and communicate Core Values, redesign engineering interview process (hire faster and better), improve new hire onboarding (get new employees up-to-speed faster), establish career ladder, goal-setting (OKRs, KPIs), and plan quarterly/annual roadmaps.

Earned the trust and respect of my stakeholders through effective staffing (a team of 4-7), prioritizing tasks that positively impacted readers, and then achieving Vanity Fair’s digital objectives.

• Collaborated with product and design, as well as reporters, photographers and editors in the newsroom throughout the full product lifecycle.
• Stabilized team engineering standards, process, and velocity.
• Created opportunities for engineers to own aspects of development aligned with their passions and career goals.
• Successfully completed (and ahead of schedule), three new web verticals (The Hive, Vanities, and HWD), alongside tentpole events including the Oscars and New Establishment summits.
• Surpassed web performance KPIs ahead of all 20+ Condé brands, evangelized our research and findings both company-wide and within the industry via conferences and meetups.

Led a team of three-to-five developers and rebuilt morale during a difficult leadership transition and major product pivot.

Worked directly with the CEO after a company pivot to build a new engineering team while also stabilizing early product roadmap.

Contributed to the architecture, development, and maintenance of several high-stakes web properties.

Thanks to some quick thinking and ingenuity from my team, we were able quickly repurpose existing site-functionality to take advantage of an influx of traffic which resulted in a 100-fold increase in VF's subscriptions - netting the magazine more than a million dollars.

Condé Nast’s Technology team was faced with a challenge: over 20 different brands were using different systems, tech stacks, and programming languages - a situation that strained the IT teams, both culturally and technically.

Asked to weigh in with his expert opinion, Vanity Fair’s director of engineering Matthew Hudson blamed the issue on “plain ol’ shoddy coding.”

JavaScript module for device detection with 3.7K stars on Github and roughly 45K monthly downloads on NPM.

A simple guide to the wonders git hooks.