A core part of working here at Fluency is the opportunity to make a profound impact on virtually every aspect of our business—regardless of location. Spanning across 11 states—and counting—we’ve built quite the dynamic team and we want you to get to know them. That’s why we’ve created The Fluency Five, a five question blog series about what makes our employees special and what they love about working here.
Getting to know Matt DeDiana, Senior Web Developer
Meet Matt DeDiana, our Senior Web Developer here at Fluency. Matt joined us nearly five years ago in 2018 as our fifth employee and is our only full-stack engineer on the team.
1. What brought you to Fluency?: When Fluency started at the VCET co-working office in Burlington, I was working remotely for my previous company at the same place. I had been with Ellucian for about 10 years, 8 of which were remote, and was looking for something new.
I knew I wanted to work for a local company, on a locally-based team, doing something new and exciting. When I saw a job posting for a Front-End Engineer, I walked over to the Fluency table and introduced myself. That scored me an interview, and a month later, I moved my "desk" 50 feet to my new job! I was the fifth non-founder to join, and it was really exciting to be building something totally new.
2. What’s something interesting about your role?: I'm the only Full-Stack engineer on the team. At Fluency, that means I write front-end UI code in one language (Javascript) and back-end server code in another (Java). Mostly, I work on projects that are either frontend or backend, but occasionally, I'll write code across all the systems for projects. This can sometimes speed up development, and it also frees up time for other members of my team.
3. What’s the most interesting part about working at Fluency?: Fluency is really forging a new way for engineering teams to be "Agile." We eschew the management driven processes and meetings that bog down an engineer's week, and instead focus on ways to streamline the engineering, building, and coding. At my previous job, I often thought, "Please...just let me code." Whereas at Fluency, it's a daily occurance to have large chunks of focus time when I'm most productive. I know many of my teammates feel the same way.
4. Can you tell us something personal about you?: I appreciate the wide variety of music-related interests at Fluency. I bring vocals, guitar, and keyboard to the band. And you can call me whenever you need a classically-trained tenor to sing in your choir or opera chorus.
5. What are you most looking forward to this year in your role and/or at the company?
This year I’m looking forward to rolling out some new product offerings. In particular, we have a nascent product called CoLab that allows our customers to get branding, budgeting and strategy data from their customers to plug directly into their automated advertising blueprints. I’m building a “customizer” on top of CoLab so our customers can build and tailor their own versions of the website. On the business side, I’m really excited about our pipeline. We have some huge logos in the hopper that could really increase our growth trajectory. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities!
Join Our Team - We’re Hiring!
Want to join Matt and the rest of the team in an innovative and collaborative working environment? We’re hiring! Browse our career page and apply for an open role, today.
