Matt Connley profile picture

Hi there I’m Matt Connley,
an experienced IT leader and innovator based in Chicago

  • 25+ Years Experience
  • 5 Industries
  • 9 Happy Employers

My Latest Blog Post

3D Printed Intel NUC Rack Mount

The compute in my home lab consists of six Intel NUCs. I hope to describe my rationale for choosing these PCs in greater detail in a future post, but for my purposes they work well. I’m fortunate enough these days to have a closet in which I run my entire lab environment, and which will […] ... [ Read More! ]

My full blog is available at https://blog.connley.net

About Me

I've been fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember.

Growing up, I loved to take things apart and put them back together. Tinkering with radios, cassette players, other various gadgets, toys, and of course Legos was part of my everyday fun. Soon PCs gained my interest, and while I may not have known it at the time, it was the start of an enduring desire to figure out how things work -- and find ways to make them work better.

I began my career relatively early, starting my first job at a local ISP when I was 16. Since then I've worked in a number of environments, ranging from small-town startups to global enterprises. I take great pride and pleasure in building creative, innovative solutions to the real-world problems I come across, and never turn down the chance to help make businesses more effective and efficient at what they do, no matter how daunting the challenge.

Over the course of my career, I've cultivated a diverse work background that spans engineering, architecture, and technical leadership. I've developed highly-available, highly-parallel, service-oriented applications supporting functions such as infrastructure and business process monitoring, trading operations, and centralized systems management. I also led the delivery of a private cloud platform and am currently the principal architect on an enterprise-wide observability program.

I pride myself on being as full-stack an engineer as I can, from the user experience all the way down "to the metal."

To me, technology is more than a career; it's something I love and a life-long passion that I'm lucky enough to pursue every day. Despite the fact that I've been in this field for over two decades, according to that old adage, I've never really worked a day in my life.

High-Level Skills

  • Application Development
  • Infrastructure Engineering and Automation
  • Monitoring & Observability
  • SRE
  • Private & Public Cloud
  • DevOps
  • Product Management
  • ITSM

Technical Skills

  • Windows and Linux OS
  • Load Balancing, Network Automation and Fundamentals/DDI
  • VMWare vSphere/Aria Suite
  • IIS, Active Directory
  • .NET (C#), ASP.NET/Core, MVC, REST, WPF/WCF, MVVM
  • SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, InfluxDB, Prometheus
  • Kubernetes, Rancher, Azure, AWS, GCP, SaltStack, Packer, Docker Helm
  • Splunk, Grafana Stack, Telegraf, OpenTelemetry

Non-Technical Skills

  • Excellent Written Communication
  • Collaborative, Empathetic, Team-Oriented Mindset
  • Relationship Builder
  • Strong Presentation/Speaking Ability
  • Deep Curiousity and Life-Long Passion for Technical Problem Solving

Certifications

  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals/AZ-900 - 2022
  • Lean IT Foundation - 2018

Other Interests

  • Home Labbing
  • Home Automation
  • Sailing