We caught up with Senior Developer Matthew Martin recently to learn more about his work developing apps with Wave Digital, and adventures in Australia’s great outdoors.
Can you tell us about your role developing apps with Wave – what challenges do you help clients to solve?
My work with Wave spans a lot of areas – mobile app and backend development, DevOps and some occasional web frontend work. I work closely with some clients to find ways to bring their ideas to life, often through creative means to work within limitations.
I enjoy helping clients solve complex problems, whether that be working across distributed systems with lots of moving data or a dynamic mobile app with plenty of data flowing around.
What drives and inspires you in your work with Wave?
I enjoy the breadth of clients that I have worked with. Wave works with founders with interesting ideas, but also with larger government and corporate clients who come with a different set of requirements and ways of working.
Interesting projects have involved interfacing with bluetooth devices (Myer Christmas Bauble), or pushing the bounds of what we can do with developing apps for modern mobile devices.
We’ve worked with apps that are time sensitive and must scale with spiky usage patterns. The engineering that these platforms require can make them interesting to work on. The Push Up Challenge is a great example of an app that scales to thousands of users during the event, and has now grown to become international.
As our longest-serving team member, how has Wave evolved over the last 12 years – what changes have you been a part of?
When I started with Wave, mobile apps were taking off in a big way. Wave was making moves into this space, and that has only increased since then. The technologies used to build mobile apps have evolved and Wave has kept abreast with these changes, mostly writing hybrid apps these days to enable rapid development.
Wave was using cloud technologies when I joined, and continues to, however with the advent of containerisation how we host apps has changed.
Guy became Managing Director not long after I had started and has continually evolved business practices to grow Wave into the well-oiled machine that it is now.
What do you see on the horizon for Wave?
It’s always exciting to see larger projects, or projects that have been in the works for a longer period launch.
I’d love someone to come to us with an interesting augmented reality project, so that we can play with Apple Vision or Meta Quest etc. The same is probably true for AI, this is an area that will continue to mature and practical use cases will emerge.
Looking back, are there any life experiences that led you to this career? How did you get to where you are today?
I was exposed to early desktop computers (running DOS) from a young age, though I was mostly playing games at the time (Commander Keen). I had an amazing primary school teacher who led us to write a guess the number game on an early Apple computer, which to me at the time was pretty magic.
These experiences, and becoming aware of The Internet at about the same time, definitely sparked my interest and led me to the career path that I’m now on.
How do you like to spend your time when you’re not developing apps with Wave?
I love to travel and there are many places that I’d love to visit. Volcanoes are a constant source of amazement, and I’d love to include them in future travel (Iceland, Mt Etna in Italy, Hawaii).
I enjoy cycling and would like to undertake more bikepacking in the future. This is basically backpacking on a bike. We have plenty of rail trails in Victoria and Australia and more routes are being created all over the world. Maybe this will be a feature of a future holiday?
Wave is proud to develop apps for clients across Australia. Do you have a favourite place in Australia, why is this special to you?
I have some favourite general places:
- The bush, and being out in nature/camping – it’s calming and a nice change from modern screen-driven lives.
- The beach, especially on a warm summer's day – it reminds me of holidays and is a nice change of scene.
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Do you have an app idea? We’d love to hear from you, get in touch with us today.
