What They Use - Matthew Griffiths

What do we use at work? This series of posts interviews the Ushahidi staff about their methods of working and the tools they use. The profile of a different employee will be posted twice a week until we make our way through most or all of the staff!

"I'm a real family guy." - Matt Griffiths

What's your day to day at Ushahidi like? So, I'm pretty sure that I remember my first day working for Ushahidi as being a long hard afternoon spent in Bubbles O'Leary's (my local Irish bar) with Jon Gos discussing the potential for the SwiftRiver project over several cold Clubs. (Club is what passes for larger here in UG). Its surprising - or perhaps not - to see such an exciting platform grow for those early - and perhaps slightly too enthusiastic - discussions ;) How did you get involved in the software/tech space? So I studied Computer Science in London and worked for a tech company all the way through my degree. I worked as a software developer and then as a development team leader and finally as a software architect planning, designing and managing ebusiness, ecommerce and financial system. I did all this for about 8 years before I move to Uganda with my wife where I got deeply involved with the tech community out here. I currently sit on the board of Appfrica (a Ugandan based tech incubator) and I help to run and manage the Hive CoLab which is a free and open tech space used by Uganda tech entrepreneurs, oh and I also work for Ushahidi :D What are some of your favorite apps for work and how do you use them? True to form, I'm going to answer this from a techy point of view: I love FireBug (web developer extension for FireFox) any web devs out there who haven't heard of it GET IT NOW! It is IMHO the very best aid to client side web development! Then for server side dev stuff, I'm a massive fan of NetBeans (I know, I know: "isn't that the IDE kids use?") well not any more, their latest releases are great and it has loads of support for Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP. I'm a big proponent of Unit Tests in code and NetBeans fully supports integrated unit tests in most languages! Then as far as frameworks go: I like KO3 for PHP, its defiantly the nicest PHP MVC framework around and there is loads of good support for it on the web. Then in the Python space, I have to admire Django (event though I only use it occasionally) just cause it QUICK AS YOU LIKE to develop apps on. That said, I have always preferred frameworks to be a bit less all encompassing and so my recent faves are Flask for web application development and just straight Werkzeug for developing web services on As a final note, I are really starting to love NoSQL DBs, MongoDB is great and we about to start a project on Apache Cassandra (which is meant to be wicked, if not a bit of a pig to get going)! What are some cool projects you're working on right now at Ushahidi or; What excites you about your work right now? Well, what a question: Obviously we think everything that work on is - well doesn't everyone :). To be serious for a minute, the SwiftRiver platform is really coming alive at the moment and as Director of Platform I get to be involved in all the cool new stuff going on, great things on the horizon are: We are about to make all out web services publicly available so developers around the world can play with out NLP, Geocoding, Duplication filtering services (and many more). Were also about to start development on RiverID, this is a huge project with some sky high aims but if we can pull it off we think it could be one of the best contributions by the open source community to content curation yet! Then we have new releases of our two web apps Sweeper and SwiftMeme soon to launch and the long awaited SwiftMail to come - what a busy time! What helps you make it through each day? Ah now that's an easy one! My 8 month old son, Harley. He's wicked and nothing to do with work or tech (although he does sit on my lap sometimes while I'm coding - could that be the reason for our bug count, lol). The one thing you can't live without? So, same as above, really. Despite the fact that I work my ass off on SwiftRiver projects all the hours that god sends, I'm a real family guy and like nothing better than sitting down to breakfast with my wife Venita and our son. I work from home a lot which gives me loads of time to spend with my family (even though I then end up working till midnight)! So for me its a balance between working on great cool things that keep my brain and energy up and spending loads of time with my family.