Hi, I'm Matt.

I love to tell stories on the web, taking data and shaping it into something compelling through analysis and visualization.


My Recent Work

How To Fake A Long Exposure Photo Of Earth At Night

February 2023

Learn how to fake a long-exposure photo of earth at night using Photoshop and Suomi NPP Satellite imagery.


Why Does Sunlight Come From The North In Shaded Relief Maps?

July 2021

An explanation of how human perception influences the position of sunlight in shaded relief maps. Lots of pictures.


How We Turn Satellite Imagery Into Wall Art

June 2021

A deep dive into how we at Ramble Maps combine raw satellite imagery (clouds and all) into beautiful wall art.


COVID in the Counties

April 2020

A data visualization that showed the spread and growth of COVID-19 at the county-level during the early days of the pandemic. At the time of publication, there was no way to see this data broken out at the county-level. Shut down in September 2020.


Ramble Maps

January 2020

High resolution maps of mountains, states, national parks, and other beautiful terrain. We use the highest resolution data available and print maps using the latest photographic printing techniques to produce maps at the limit of what the human eye can perceive.


How To Communicate As You Scale Your Org

November 2019

Embracing a written culture can help your org get through growing pains as you scale from small to medium sized.


Inertial Navigation In Marine Robotics

May 2019

An introduction to inertial navigation in marine robotics, from the sensors used to the mathematical tools needed to fuse that sensor data into a navigation solution


An Email-Only Authentication Scheme

October 2018

A post on bugbucket.io outlining a JSON Web Token based, email-only authentication scheme that I used for that application.


Beyond The Fat Arrow: Functional Programming In Javascript

April 2016

A quick survey of functional concepts and a discussion of the perils of mutating state and how you can use immutable data structures to protect against unwanted side effects in your javascript.


Programmer Artist: LakeBrite at the ECHO Center

December 2015

LakeBrite was a 7,500 node, 3D LED matrix installed at the ECHO Center in 2015. As the first "programmer artist" for the installation, I designed the interface to the LEDs and developed the first handful of data visualizations used in the 24ft x 9ft x 5ft display.


Improving The Weather On Twitter: Using NWS Data To Make Animated Radar GIFs

July 2015

How I used National Weather Service data and imagery to make a network of twitter bots that post regional radar GIFs with improved palettes and projections.


Negotiating HTTP/2: ALPN And The TLS Handshake

April 2015

The HTTP/2 specification was approved on February 18, 2015 and implementation has already begun. In this post, I explain how HTTP/2 will be negotiated in today's web.


Mt. Mansfield Snow Depth

February 2015

A data visualization that allows users to compare the snow depth on Mt. Mansfield for a particular season against the historical record. This chart was used as an example of an effective visualization in "Good Charts" by the Harvard Business Review, was retweeted by Edward Tufte (who wrote the book on data visualization), and was shared by the Washington Post on their "Know More" blog.


wxGIF: Beautiful Radar Made For Twitter

January 2015

A network of 15 Twitter bots that tweeted animated radar GIFs every 2 hours (until I shut down the service in April 2017). I took static NWS images, changed the projection, basemap, and palette—making it color-blind friendly and more intuitive—and strung the images together into GIFs.


Lyme On The Rise: A Look At The Numbers

July 2014

A data project for Vermont Public Radio on the growth of Lyme Disease over the last 15 years. Includes an interactive bar graph of New England and small multiples of Vermont and the continental United States showing the infection's expanded range. Published in the open with links to the data.


Under The Hood

November 2013

A news app that explained how Vermont Health Connect works and—when it didn't—showed where it was broken.