Matthew A. Cacho

Los Angeles, CA

I'm a full-stack software engineer who likes to build fun and interesting things.

About me

Hello! My name is Matthew, a Software Engineer working for Duffl.

My passion for development started in college. While studying Electrical Engineering, I took a couple of CS classes and became interested in programming. At the same time, cybersecurity became my main interest and eventually I pursued a career in I.T. Eventually, I realized I wanted to write code and switched careers.

Since I work with computers a lot, I try to touch grass every weekend. I enjoy running, bouldering, camping, hiking, and backpacking. Some of my highlights in the past year include two half marathons, backpacking in Hetchy Hetchy, and summiting Half Dome!

Matthew Cacho's photo

Skills

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • SQL

Frameworks

  • React
  • React Native
  • Django
  • NextJS
  • Express
  • Jekyll
  • Gatsby
  • Tailwinds

Technologies

  • Node
  • SCSS
  • Redux
  • Git/GitHub
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • GraphQL
  • AWS
  • Docker

Work Experience

  • Duffl

    Senior Software Engineer

    May 2022 - Present
    • (YC W20) Developed frontend and backend features for an e-commerce startup that served 60,000 customers and processed over 1,000 transactions per day
  • KABC-TV

    Broadcast Engineer

    Jan 2020 - May 2022
    • Provided technical support to live broadcast news operations, call-in shows, and remote shows, such as The Academy Awards
    • Served as the subject-matter expert for the newsroom control system (NRCS), managing 40 servers and 100 client machines
    • Created PowerShell scripts that remotely install fixes for the NRCS, currently used by the 8 Disney-owned ABC stations
    • Built bash scripts that automate log and data gathering for technical troubleshooting and root cause analysis
    • Installed enterprise-level servers and wrote technical documentation on their network and cable connections
    • Equipped, upgraded, and maintained the computer systems of more than 30 news trucks
  • Dalet

    Technical Support Engineer

    Jul 2018 - Jan 2020
    • Led the technical support for West Coast customers, hosting weekly calls to resolve outstanding issues
    • Organized and performed over 20 software upgrades in the USA
    • Deployed technical plans and SQL scripts to improve customer workflows
    • Reported software bugs and validated bug fixes before pushing changes to production software

Open Source Communities

  • HackForLA - Lucky Parking

    Full Stack Lead

    Jan 2022 - Present
    • Responsible for leading the front and backend architecture planning and documentation efforts, using tools such as Node, Express, React, Redux, PostgreSQL, Mapbox, Tailwinds, AWS, and Docker
    • Implemented a staging environment on AWS EC2, S3, and CloudFront to allow team review before production deployment
    • Dockerized Node and PostgreSQL to quicken development time and minimize computer resource usage
    • Automated the CI/CD pipeline for both production and development environments using GitHub Actions
    • Protected against SQL injection attacks by parameterizing SQL queries in Node
  • HackForLA - Lucky Parking

    Full Stack Developer

    Sep 2021 - Jan 2022
    • Improved the website’s camera movement to automatically resize and recenter the map based on the selected region
    • Collaborated with cross-functional UI/UX team to update header and sidebar components for a streamlined user experience
    • Created a hashtable of abbreviated color and body types so each ticket citation can properly convey a car’s description instead of using abbreviations
  • HackForLA - Website

    Technical Lead

    Oct 2021 - Dec 2021
    • Facilitated and led weekly team meetings and office hours to mentor and assist developers through structured agendas, stand-ups, individual progress checks, blocker clearing, and code reviews
    • Worked with interdisciplinary team to create and prioritize issues to increase team velocity and capability, including coordinating design/development and development/research hand-offs
    • Recruited, onboarded, trained and mentored new tech leaders and transitioned my replacement into the technical lead role
    • Created a framework for UI/UX to standardize the use of website alt text to meet WCAG compliance, and provided existing alt text across entire website for review and revision
    • Reviewed 101 pull requests across 40 developers to ensure that each PR is within scope and requirements of the issue, in order to maintain a high standard for code quality and monitor the stability of the production website after each merge
    • Contributed 82 issues to the prioritized backlog for developers of all skill levels while creating and teaching a new standard for effective issue writing to a team of 5 developers
  • HackForLA - Website

    Full Stack Developer

    Jun 2021 - Oct 2021
    • Supervised the directory and code restructure of the project’s GitHub Actions to ensure their maintainability, saving 100 hours of technical lead time across 20 Hack for LA teams
    • Secured the team’s GitHub API key when integrating with Google Apps Scripts and created a new internal library for GitHub API requests
    • Wrote a GitHub Action to alert issue creators of missing labels, saving 19 hours of product management time annually
    • Created embedded website widgets using iframes, resulting in increased visibility of various HackForLA projects

Projects

Lucky Parking

React, Redux, Node, PostgreSQL

Visualization of the parking citation tickets in the Los Angeles Metro Area.

Front End contributions: implementation of new header and search components design, map zoom in/out based on selected area, search boundary bug fix, map drawing tool bug fix, and leading the efforts for the code restructure and new design implementation.

Back End contributions: code restructure, dockerization of Node and PostgreSQL for development and data science, automated CD process with GitHub Actions, addition of backend unit testing (to be added to an automated CI process), addition of linting process with Husky, Lint-Staged, Prettier and ESLint, and creation of a staging environment on an AWS EC2 instance.

Gyul! Hap!

Vue, Tailwinds

Gyul! Hap! is based on a game from the Korean Show The Genius. It consists of a grid of nine tiles, where each tile is defined by a shape color, shape, and background color.

A "Hap" is a set of three tiles where each property (shape color, shape, background color) is either all the same or all different between the three tiles.

A "Gyul" can be called when all matches have been found (or in a rare instance, there were no matches initially), ending the game.

tote

Next.js, Tailwinds

Tote (time + quote) displays a changing color background based on the current time of the day. Each minute, the app displays a new quote.

This app takes advantage of the SSR (server side rendering) feature of Next.js, where each visit to the page makes an API request to zenquotes.io to retrieve a list of fifty quotes to cycle from. When the cycle is finished, a new API request is made to refresh the list.

Portfolio Website

Gatsby, GraphQL

This website! This app is statically generated before deployment via Gatsby, and each information on the website are obtained via a GraphQL call to mdx content files. This allows me to change data on the mdx files without having to dig through lines of code.

Get in touch: 

email me!