Matthew Hirst
Head Of Engineering at Hornet
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Hirst is a Head of Engineering with 16 years of hands-on experience building and scaling Ruby on Rails platforms, currently leading engineering and infrastructure at Hornet and Queer Spaces. He combines deep backend expertise (Rails, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, Cassandra) with AWS operations, security and cost-conscious architecture for products serving tens of millions of users. Matthew progressed from client-focused pair-programming at Platform45 to remote senior leadership at Device Magic and platform engineering at Hornet, where he learned to ship resilient features at scale. He teaches and mentors—having run Rails courses and led small teams—while staying an active, fast-learning technologist who enjoys experimenting with new tools. A highlight from his early career was placing second in the Rails Rumble, reflecting both rapid prototyping skill and strong product focus. Based in the Western Cape, he pairs academic rigor (UCT BSc and BSc Hons with distinction) with practical delivery across global consumer-facing systems.
16 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Hons, Computer Science, BSc Hons, Computer Science at University of Cape TownFairmont High School
English, Afrikaans
Github Skills (55)
notification-service10
pushy10
mvc10
windows-phone10
rails10
wns10
webpush10
push-notifications10
ruby10
html10
activerecord10
firebase-cloud-messaging10
ruby-on-rails10
jquery-plugin9
jquery9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
SixiS/rails
Jun 2023 - Jul 2025
Ruby on Rails
Contributions:1 PR, 19 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years
platform45/nakedpassword
Jan 2010 - Mar 2011
jQuery plugin to encourage strong user passwords
Contributions:12 commits in 1 year 1 month
jquery-plugin
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