DougHughes.net

Hello, My name is Matt and this is my story:

I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana but spent the majority of my formative years in a city in northern Alabama called Huntsville. Huntsville is the home of the US Space and Rocket Center and Space Camp. I spent the majority of my youth running, thinking about running or selling running shoes.

I went to the University of Richmond in Virginia where I studied Business Administration and Sports Administration. I headed back south for graduate school at the University of Alabama where I earned a Masters and Marketing and was able to finish out my NCAA eligibility.

I started building websites towards the end of graduate school largely revolving around our successful track and field program and other running related news. I quickly became a Macromedia fan boy and relied largely on Dreamweaver Fireworks, and Flash MX.

After a brief stint in Europe, where I started dating my future wife, I landed a job working with the Olympic marathon trials where I was in charge of elite athlete coordination and assigned the task of building the website (Flash/PHP). After the trials I moved north to East Lansing, Michigan where my wife started attending medical school at Michigan State.

I continued to work in web development and gravitated towards application development. I tried hard to use Macromedia Flash as a front end to drive database driven software with varying success. I wrote an inventory management system for a large athletic store that is still in production and eventually took a job with a web development firm named Artemis Solutions.

At Artemis I worked as a project manager, sales consultant and occasionally was given the opportunity to do development work. In 2005 I started dabbling with a Macromedia Flex. I started spending more and more of my free time writing Flex applications and eventually took a job with Cynergy Systems.

At Cynergy I was able to work as a Flex developer on some really large and exciting business applications. We worked with a plethora of back-end service languages and I was exposed to a number of extremely challenging development scenarios.

In the past two years I’ve been playing with Java, Objective C, Ruby on Rails, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring multi-touch application development. I’ve enjoyed messing with the hardware challenges and I’m a regular contributer to the Natural User Interface’s community.

We recently moved to the greater Portland area, where my wife took a job at a local hospital. We’re both enjoying the Pacific Northwest weather and particularly enjoy the large amount of area running trails.

When away from the LCD, I enjoy running with my dog Dorito, rock climbing with my wife and I’ve recently joined a table tennis club, local area running club and the PDXRIA Adobe user group.

I’m excited to be joining the Alagad team. I am impressed with the list of rock star developers that Doug has been putting together and I’m eager to learn from and contribute to this talented team of software engineers.