Matthew J Waller, BSc
Principal Web Developer
Matthew looks after the systems behind more than 300 Sanger domains and subdomains. They run on over 200 virtual machines across OpenStack, VMware and AWS.
The team look after 26 active WordPress sites. They also build up to seven new themes each year. Each theme is built in its own sandbox, using Sass, core WordPress, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Pro and custom plugins. Matthew works on new themes and assists with Sass and release issues while also keeping sites refreshed to the schedule their owners have requested.
The web team runs a collection of internal React applications. Matthew builds the live and dev servers they run on, keeps them up to date and helps other developers follow good practices.
The web team helps with management of more than 300 tools and sites built by scientists, and Matthew sets up new ones at short notice. This requires SSL certificates, DNS records, traffic routing and Rapid7 security scans.
Matthew helps coordinate the (Ivanti) Virtual Traffic Managers (VTM), Apache and Nginx configurations needed to send traffic to the backend servers. Some applications run in Docker containers, some use OpenStack, while others use AWS for static serverless sites. Matthew uses custom Python, Perl and bash scripts to manage the day-to-day running and workflow automation.