In 1999, towards the end of the dot-com era, having worked for almost a decade as a senior software engineer both in the UK and in the US, Matthew set-up as a freelance software development consultant looking with a vision of working with organisations to help them write better software and to do so more effectively. For the next five years he worked with a number of market leading companies, including BBC Worldwide and Microsoft, together with smaller companies that were nonetheless market leaders in their space such as Demon Internet, FSI (FM Solutions) Ltd and Burges Salmon LLP.
During this time Matthew was extremely active in the software development community, particularly around .NET. He was invited by
Wrox Press – at the time one of the top producers of technical content – to join them as a .NET expert. This gave him unprecedented access to Microsoft .NET right from the very start of this technology. This included bi-monthly trips to Microsoft’s HQ in Seattle to meet with the original .NET program managers and developers, and the opportunity to write many books on .NET. (
List available here.) His most popular title of this period was “
Beginning E-commerce”, a book on developing e-commerce sites that sold 40,000 copies in its first six months. He also worked in this period as a contributor to ASP Today and C# Today, two highly popular .NET developer Web sites. He also founded
.NET 247, a .NET developer resource site recognised by Microsoft through induction into the .NET Code Wise Community. The site remains popular to this day attracting 250,000 visitors a month.
In 2004, Matthew’s commercial vision changed from improving software delivery capability in other firms in order to concentrate on building a strong technical team that he could deploy on customer projects. MBR IT Solutions, known simply as “
MBRIT” to its customers, as grown considerably since its foundation. The technical team, under Matthew’s technical guidance, has worked on a number of projects providing significant commercial value to customers. Projects include a trading platform for home and contents insurance, including integration with popular price comparison sites, a order processing and customer relationship management systems for one the UK’s largest manufacturer of garden products and a system to help detect and reduce fraud in the UK health insurance industry. Case studies of these projects and more are available on the
MBRIT Web site.
Also in 2004, Matthew was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for his work with Microsoft Visual Studio in the software development community.
In 2008, Matthew founded
AMX Software, a software incubator with a vision of bringing new and exciting software products onto the market. The first product developed by AMX is
Topaz Filer, a tool for helping law firms and other professional service firms to manage their email corpus. During 2009, AMX will be releasing products to help larger organisations manage email-related compliance issues and a number of cross-platform mobile solutions.
Since the inception of .NET in 2001, Matthew has developed and maintained
BootFX – an application framework designed to help developers build highly maintainable and manageable .NET applications. The framework is distributed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1 and hence is free for use by any software development team the world over. At the time of writing, BootFX underpins hundreds of commercial applications, applications that the companies using them are dependent on in order to generate hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue on aggregate.
Matthew maintains a blog at
www.mbr247.com featuring industry comment. He also maintains a Twitter feed
@mbrit, which is used primarily to share interesting technical and commercial content with UK IT community.
He is currently working on a new book, due to be released in Spring 2010.
Matthew’s career objective remains to work with senior decision makers to both a) support them in achieving the best possible software delivery capability from a technical perspective b) support them in making excellent commercial decisions with regards to software investment that maximise their return on that investment while ensuring a workable and flexible long term technology strategy for the firm.
Please see the
Contact page to make contact with Matthew.