Matthew Arbo

Background

About Matthew Arbo

At my core, I love to empower people through technical knowledge, especially if it's just outside my current capabilities. That's meant a lot of things over the years. Most recently, it's meant picking up an open-source Laravel project, a task just outside of my previous experience of "PHP outside of a framework"(and working out the kinks in the reverse proxy setup, just outside my previous Docker knowledge). At my last position, it meant picking up Java after a decade off of it, and MongoDB for the first time. Coming at the software we used with more coding knowledge than anyone on the rest of my team, but more domain knowledge than anyone on the dev team, I was able to refactor the code to better match business logic, giving my my team shorter processing times to get their work done faster and the dev team easier code to work on for further features. Other times, it's been about being able to explain the knowledge. When an inch-thick binder labeled "IRS Regulations 4980H, 6055, and 6056" came back from the copy shop, I dove into it, seeing a way to expand my knowledge to answer Affordable Care Act questions for our clients.(And heading home knowing I'd helped those clients with "I'd like to understand my 1095-Cs better, but I don't have time to learn the law myself" is squarely part of empowering people with the knowledge.) This trend was true during my time in academia too: when my advisor first told me about the subject that later became my research area, part of what appealed to me was "people often use these as testing grounds for general theories, because they allow you to determine high-level concepts with simple combinatorics calculations." In a couple of cases, I've been the point person for using narrow programming languages of GAP and Macaulay2. And of course, there's the classical way to empower people with technical knowledge: all of the work that went into the time I spent at the head of a classroom of undergraduates signed up to learn about trigonometry, calculus, or statistics.