About Matt Sicker
My name is Matt Sicker, and this is my website. Growing from an early interest in the intersection of pure mathematics and computer science, I’ve long been fascinated by functional programming, cryptography, and metaprogramming generally speaking, along with philosophies like the free software movement and the Apache Way. I currently work as a software engineer at Apple contributing to Spinnaker. On the side, I’m a member of the Apache Software Foundation where I’m the current Secretary of the foundation and a member of the Logging Services PMC. At Apache, I mostly contribute to Apache Log4j and the Logging Services project more broadly, though I’m also mentoring the Apache Teaclave incubating podling, a universal secure computing platform with better data privacy and security through use of secure computing hardware extensions like Intel SGX and secure coding practices enforced by Rust and its memory safety. I’m also a member of the Apache Commons PMC and the Apache OpenWhisk PMC, the latter being a prior Apache Incubator mentorship. Locally, I’m on the board of directors and secretary of the Chicago Java Users Group.
As a polyglot programmer, my most common languages include Java, Scala, C, C++, Python, Kotlin, Groovy, SQL, JavaScript, and a copious amount of shell scripts, both Bourne-compatible and bash-enhanced, though I will always claim that Lisp is my favorite even if I don’t use it much. As this page isn’t a CV, I’ll avoid stuffing more languages here that I’ve merely dabbled with or can only read or write limited amounts of, though I will point to an interesting programming language called Zig that I recommend looking at as an alternative to C and C alternatives if you have a need for system level programming and aren’t particularly keen on learning all the intracacies of a language like Rust. I like to publish as much of my own code as I can using approporiate open source licenses (usually one of Apache 2, ISC, MIT, or GPLv3) which are available via my GitHub profile. During non-pandemic times, I also like to do presentations at and attend meetups related to all these topics. I’m also a bit nerdy about cooking, coffee, and beer.