Matthew J Waller, BSc
Principal Web Developer
Matthew operates end-to-end web operations, infrastructure, platform engineering, and security powering scientific and organizational digital platforms. He manages an enterprise footprint of over 300 domains / subdomains running across over 200 virtual machines (OpenStack, VMware and Amazon), supporting custom WordPress sites and React/Node web developers with short-notice deployment capabilities.
The team oversees a WordPress ecosystem comprising 26 actively developed sites. The team delivers six to seven new website themes each year. Utilizing Sass, core WordPress, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Pro and custom plugins, the team constructs custom themes within isolated sandbox environments. Matthew provides ongoing technical support for theme, sass, and deployment issues while ensuring that public-facing sites are continuously updated according to specified site owner requirements.
The web team manage a portfolio of React applications. To support these applications, Matthew builds and maintains production-ready execution environments specifically tailored for React and ensures these environments remain up to date. Beyond maintaining the runtime infrastructure, Matthew actively supervises React developers, establishing and enforcing deployment best practices to ensure robustness.
The web team supports a wide network of scientist-developed tools and resources – over 300 at last count. Matthew supports configuring and launching these scientific properties at short notice. This includes setting up SSL certificates and DNS records, managing traffic routing and executing Rapid7 security scans to ensure critical scientific endpoints remain secure, compliant, and continuously accessible.
To power and secure this diverse ecosystem, the team utilizes a versatile technical stack. Core compute resources are distributed across OpenStack and VMWare, alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) serverless hosting, with Docker employed to containerize application runtimes. Website routing, reverse proxies, and traffic management are orchestrated through Ivanti Virtual Traffic Manager (VTM), apache and nginx, while system operations and workflow automations are driven by custom Python and Perl scripts. Finally, application security is maintained using Rapid7 AppSec to execute routine vulnerability scans and enforce proactive remediation across all web properties.