From chef to code - Glasswall’s Matt Cavey talks careers on IT Pro Day 2021

Today - Tuesday September 21st - is IT Pro Day, and we thought it was an ideal opportunity to profile the career and work of one of Glasswall’s growing team of talented technology professionals.

As our Head of Cloud Engineering, Matt Cavey oversees the dev, test and SRE functions within the Glasswall cloud team. His primary product focus is our core email product, something Matt and his team have been heavily focused on over the last 24 months.

Most recently, he has led major development work on the Glasswall email platform to scale it for the needs of larger customers, and as a result, it’s now capable of handling 56x more traffic than ever before. “The cloud team is particularly proud of the effort that’s gone into this work,” Matt said. “In a tight 12 week development and rollout timeline, we’ve built out the product to use everything the cloud gives us for resilience and high availability.”

Matt has taken an interesting - and slightly unconventional - career path for someone now in a senior technology role. “Originally, my ambition was to become a chef,” he said. “But having spent time in higher education, where I did some dev work, I began looking more seriously at the many career options offered by IT.”

This led down a path which has seen him in both test and dev roles. “I really enjoy the creative side of dev work, especially seeing projects come to fruition. I also value opportunities to share my knowledge and experiences, especially those that involve talking to the industry about the challenges and solutions inherent in a development role,” he said.

Matt believes his career journey so far offers some important guidance for people considering IT. “It’s really important to remember that roles within our industry are extremely diverse and can be both technical and non-technical,” he said. “That’s a really important point to get across, because for some people, the idea of a ‘technical’ role is a barrier. I’ve worked with project managers, for example, who didn’t have deep technology skills, but who could manage technical projects to perfection. It’s a huge field with high demand and I would encourage people to be open-minded about the opportunities it can offer.”

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