I'm Matt Kantor, a kung fu code machine residing in Mountain View, CA.
I'm interested in most things IT, especially anything that has an impact
on communication, society at large, or the ways we think and live. I'm
also into physics and astronomy,
music, sociology, philosophy, and
just about anything that I think might help me make sense of this crazy
and beautiful world. Designing things and solving problems are ways of
channeling my creative energy to shape a better future.
I grew up on a rural horse farm
in New Tripoli, PA. There still isn't cable on our street, the phone
lines were so bad that we were lucky to get a 30K internet connection,
and it took 45 minutes to traverse my old school district. We once found
moonshine under our floorboards when remodeling a room.
I don't watch TV; I enjoy the outdoors; I think that most people take
themselves way too seriously. I derive a profound sense of spiritual
fulfillment—though I'm not a religious man—through exploring the whys and
whats of this world.
What I Do
Most of my professional career has involved web design & development. I have ninja skills in software engineering, frontend & backend development, information architecture, server administration, usability & accessibility, web standards, problem-solving, video games, kitten petting, and juggling. I'm currently proficient in CSS, JavaScript (+ Prototype/jQuery), HTML (including most of the new stuff from HTML5), PHP (+ Yii), Ruby (+ Rails), ActionScript, SQL, Java, and C, but I love learning new languages and technologies. I try to use open source software and follow open standards whenever practical.
I enjoy building modular software with clean yet flexible APIs. When creating web services, I believe in building atop HTTP instead of kludging my way around it; I create RESTful systems that are truly part of the web in both spirit and practice.
A web-based platform for video analysis and training targeted at professional
sports.
I helped develop these projects from their beginnings as part of a very small
startup group. SkiClubZ.com was our proof-of-concept, focusing on the skiing
and snowboarding markets. After a lot of iteration and user feedback, we felt
we had a solid set of features and a way of packaging them into a helpful,
easy-to-use service that would meet our users' needs. We did a UI refresh and
focused the feature set to create Sprongo, a cross-sport solution based on the
insights gleaned from our experience developing SkiClubZ.com.
The site's focal point was a robust HTML5-based video player that offered
features such as variable rate slow-motion, video overlays, splitscreen,
frame-stepping, drawing tools, in-video comments, and more. Since the HTML5
video API was still young, this involved a lot of working around browser
inconsistencies (and a Flash fallback) in order to deliver the best experience
possible to each of our users.
Since the company was so small, we all did a bit of everything, but I primarily
helped with backend and frontend development, implementation planning,
deployment, interaction design for new features, testing/QA, and helping users
solve issues.
I built the last version of my site atop the (now defunct) Mephisto CMS. It
included a blog, something this version lacks because it doesn't really fit
into my pattern of online activity anymore. I created the fontend theme from
the ground up, experimenting with some UI concepts along the way.
Classmate
Classmate is a simple courseware application focused on assignment management
and scheduling.
I made it for my senior project at Ithaca College with Tenzin Zingshuk, a
fellow student. I used this project as an excuse to learn Ruby on Rails, which
was a lot of fun to jump into. It's not entirely complete; we didn't get a
chance to implement a few core features (such as messaging and class schedules)
and didn't do much cross-browser testing. Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with
the way it turned out.
My first professional web development job. A basic web presence for my mom's
horse farm which I designed/created way back in 2004. It was my first real
foray into CSS.
The site was originally built entirely with Notepad and MS Paint. It runs atop
an extensible PHP framework which I created (called Silk) that I've used for
several of my smaller projects over the years.
Education
Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY)