Matt Pope

Software Engineer, PhD Student at BYU


Game Dev Web Dev Software Engineering Research




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History

I started building web and mobile games as part of Profusion Game Development Team from 2009 to 2013, working on titles like Tribulation, MiniQuest, Ninja Sequence, and Zen Sudoku. I was also interested in web development and worked on sites like FastSWF, a SWF file hosting site.

After returning from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I began work as a software engineer and have since returned to Brigham Young University to pursue a PhD, studying how socio-technical systems evolve after a software failure.

Game Development

I started building games in 2008 and formed the Profusion Game Development Team with David (Arcano) Arcila in 2010. In 2012, we published 5 web games and worked on several projects which would launch the next year. The team's success started with Tribulation, which has received more than 2 million plays. The team's efforts concluded in late 2013. I now operate Profusion Dev as a personal site.

miniPassage 2

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July 2013 - Play: Web

Zen Sudoku

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May 2013 - Play: Web, iOS, Android

miniQuest: Trials

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November 2012 - Play: Web

Antidote

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2012 - Play: Web

miniPassage

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June 2012 - Play: Web

Ninja Sequence

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April 2012 - Play: Web

Tribulation

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January 2012 - Play: Web

Ruby Star

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May 2011 - Play: Web

Spin the World

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November 2010 - Play: Web

Work

Find me on LinkedIn if you'd like to connect professionally. I'm a graduate student at BYU, looking for work starting Summer 2024.

Programming

I have extensive experience with NodeJS and TypeScript. I've also worked on professional projects in Java, C#, C, and ActionScript 3.0.

Open Source Projects

Contributions to open-source on GitHub. I developed and ran GDR, a place for programmers to get help back in the day.

Web Development

I started building websites in 2010 for both personal and professional projects in a variety of languages.

ProfusionDev (2015-Present)

Static HTML, CSS, Bootstrap

It also happens to be the one you are on right now. Responsive design, check it out on your phone!

FastSWF (2012-2021)

Ruby on Rails, AWS, Bootstrap

FastSWF is a host for .swf, .unity3d files. The site was built to aid starting game developers by allowing game prototypes to be uploaded and managed simply.

ProfusionGames (2010-2014)

PHP, Wordpress

This site was the game blog for the Profusion Games Development Team. It also provided an API to allow the game's teams to store user data, such as highscores, achievements, etc. The site was closed a year after the game development team concluded their work.

VoidPlay (2012-2014)

PHP, CMS

The site was a game portal also managed by Profusion Games Development Team. It hosted hundreds of popular flash games and allowed users to sign up and record their progress. The site was closed shortly after the game development team concluded their work as well.

Software Engineering

HonorChecker (Summer 2022)

Find plagiarized code, for higher education. I maintained and rearchitected key portions of the software running on AWS infrastructure to significantly improve reliability and performance.

Toolkite (2018-2019)

Data warehouse and integration SaaS for e-commerce companies. I wrote integrations to Etsy, Amazon, Google Merchant, Facebook, etc and core libraries for ETL processes.

RacePass (Summer 2017)

Marathon race subscription SaaS. I worked as a full-stack engineer, matching the UI component design to mocks and developing backend API endpoints for map data and more.

Osmond Marketing (2015-2018)

Marketing and advertising firm. I provisioned, maintained, and protected web servers hosting ~30 websites. I lead development of a reputation management SaaS for the healthcare industry, integrating with Facebook, Google, etc.

Research

Google Scholar | BYU Software Engineering Lab

Failure-Driven System Evolution

PhD Dissertation, in progress. Thesis Statement: How do failures within a software system drive the evolution of the socio-technical system?

Learning From Lessons Learned: Preliminary Findings From a Study of Learning From Failure (2024)
Post-Incident Action Items: Crossroads of Requirements Engineering and Software Evolution (2024)

Non-Functional Coupling

MS Thesis. Non-functional coupling refers to the extent to which a system is affected by changes to non-functional properties in other systems.

Exploring Non-Functional Coupling in Systems of Systems (2022)
Exploring Non-Functional Coupling Between Subsystems (2021)

Graceful Degradation and Fault Tolerance

Quartermaster - A framework to help engineers and researchers model systems and techniques for graceful degradation (such as retry strategies, the circuit breaker pattern, and more) to answer questions that are normally hard to do so with production systems.

Quartermaster: A Tool for Modeling and Simulating System Degradation (2021)