Matt’s journey into software engineering was anything but typical. Breaking into the industry later in his career, completely self-taught and without a degree at the time, he achieved what many told him was impossible simply because he refused to listen. He didn’t learn architecture in the classroom at first; he learned it in the trenches: through nearly two decades of trial, error, and the hard-won lessons of real-world production outages.

Even after earning his Computer Science degree shortly after joining the industry while working full-time, Matt realized that formal education often missed a vital bridge to professional success. Today, as a Senior Software Engineer at Blackboard, LLC, his career has spanned complex, mission-critical systems across EdTech, global banking, finance, insurance, and healthcare.