Employee Spotlight: 5 Minutes with Matt Walsh, Frontend Engineer

My name is Matt Walsh. I joined Sensor Tower back in June of 2020. As part of the front-end team, I’m responsible for building the UI of new features for our app.

Favorite tech tools: Our tech stack is Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, Knockout.js, React and Cypress. On top of that, the team has spent a good deal of time improving the development and build processes. Small things like having each PR spin up its own staging server are well appreciated. We also recently built a dockerized nginx reverse proxy that allows API requests to be routed to an external server. This way, it helps with onboarding and working on new features. On top of that, all of this is well-documented. I’m happy we are an engineering team that puts so much emphasis on making each developer’s life easier.

Flexibility is key: I am thankful to have flexibility in what I work on. One project that really excites me is the migration from Knockout.js to React. We had been considering it for a while and I was happy to learn that our weeks of research paid off and we would start the migration. Right now we are in the middle of an overhaul of one of our most popular pages. This is a cross-team effort including product, design, engineering and QA. One cool thing we started is ‘planning poker.’ Estimating tickets is hard, so planning poker gamifies that process and makes it more fun. The way it works is we come up with the implementation details and discuss as a group what’s involved, then each engineer votes with their estimate of how long they think the ticket will take. After everyone votes, we reveal the results and discuss the differences before finally coming to a consensus on a final estimate. The results can sometimes be surprising and it’s helped hone my skills in approaching projects.

Turning passion into connection: The collaboration of the engineering team is really great. I started at Sensor Tower when it had already gone remote because of the pandemic. Everyone makes themselves available for code review or to talk through a ticket. Those pairing sessions have been invaluable and I walk away having learned a ton, especially when it comes to Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It’s exciting to work with people who have such a deep interest in programming and who take the time to pass on their knowledge.

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