Hi! I’m Matt, a UI/UX Designer, Icon Designer, Full Stack Developer, and Technical Writer. I am passionate about making powerful and complex software easy to understand and use for artists and coders.

Senior User Experience and User Content Designer

SideFX Software

Toronto, 2005-2021

SideFX Software makes Houdini, industry-leading 3D animation and visual effects software used in games, commercials, television and film.

I was originally hired as a Senior Technical Writer, I quickly added de-facto icon and user interface designer to my responsibilities. In 2016 my job title was officially changed to reflect my current status as chief interface designer.

I used Houdini’s embedded Python interpreter to implement a totally kick-ass embedded help server and full-text search engine, based on a very fast PEG wiki parser. In the next version I hope to replace the wiki markup with a visual editor, and finally open source the help system.

  • Design user interfaces and user experience

  • Prototype user interfaces in Python/Qt.

  • Icon designer, also supervise icon contractors.

  • Implemented dynamic, data-driven help server in Python.

  • Implemented Whoosh open-source search engine in Python.

  • Senior technical writer, supervise other tech writers.

  • User interface samples

  • Icon samples

  • Coding samples

  • Tech writing samples

Lead Developer

Whoosh (full text search library)

2009-

As part of Houdini’s help server system, I wrote a full-text indexing and search library in pure Python called Whoosh. Over the years I added more and more features and optimized to the point where it has all the features (and more) of widely-known projects like Lucene, but is just slower because of Python.

In 2013 I presented a talk about Whoosh at PyCon, the worldwide Python conference.

Whoosh now has a centralized community fork on Github, though I am still the main developer.

Full-stack Web Dev/Designer

Yellow (remote fintech startup)

2011

Yellow was a short-lived fintech startup at the beginning of the crypto era, focussed on using Bitcoin for payments in the Middle East where credit cards are uncommon.


  • Lead web designer. Implemented site style (CSS), information structure, and templates.

  • Implemented client-side JavaScript enhancements.

  • Implemented features such as user onboarding in Django/Postgres backend.

Senior Technical Writer

Alias|Wavefront (a division of SGI)

Toronto, 1999-2005

At Alias I worked on StudioTools (industrial design modelling software), and then Maya (3D animation software). I was responsible for writing the Basics, Modelling, Installation, and What’s New manuals.

In addition to writing, I took the lead on building a system to translate the documentation from FrameMaker into HTML and display it with a browsing and search interface at runtime.