Matthew Schmitz

Matthew Schmitz

Director of Load and Performance Testing at LoadView·Minneapolis–St. Paul

I help teams find out how their applications behave under real load before their customers do. Since 2004 I've worked on making systems hold up under pressure, from brokerage platforms to the cloud load testing tools other engineers now use.

About

I lead the load and performance testing group at LoadView. We're a team of engineers and developers building load testing for demanding enterprise workloads: realistic traffic from real browsers, at the scale a big launch or a holiday peak actually reaches.

Before LoadView I spent seven years at our sister company Dotcom-Monitor. I started in Professional Services, helping enterprise customers set up performance monitoring and load tests and get ready for big launches and promotions. Later, as a senior web performance engineer, I worked on the cloud-based performance testing tools themselves and ran a team that kept the load testing systems up to strict uptime and performance standards.

Earlier in my career I was on the other side of the table, at Ameriprise Financial and Wells Fargo. There I designed online trading and brokerage applications, and I did the performance tuning, capacity planning and load testing needed to roll them out nationwide.

Where I work

Since 2019
LoadView

Cloud load and stress testing for websites, web applications and APIs, using real browsers. I lead load and performance testing.

Sister company · 2012–2019
Dotcom-Monitor

Website, application and API monitoring. Where I spent seven years in web performance engineering and professional services.

Career

  1. 2019 – now
    Director of Load and Performance Testing
    LoadView

    I lead the engineers and developers building LoadView's load and performance testing for enterprise customers.

  2. 2015 – 2019
    Senior Web Performance Engineer
    Dotcom-Monitor

    Built new features for cloud-based, enterprise performance testing tools. Ran a team of web performance engineers that kept the load testing systems up to strict uptime and performance standards. Oversaw QA testing and benchmarking projects.

  3. 2012 – 2015
    Web Performance Engineer
    Dotcom-Monitor

    Led the Professional Services group, which advised enterprise customers on performance monitoring and load testing. Customised scripts and alerts, wrote guidelines for full-cycle load testing, and helped customers scale for high-profile launches. Fed what we learned back into the product with the development team.

  4. 2008 – 2012
    System Architect Team Lead contract
    Ameriprise Financial

    Worked with enterprise architects to roll out online trading applications. Did performance tuning and profiling before release, capacity planning and load testing, and built custom monitoring for the web and back-end systems.

  5. 2004 – 2008
    Senior Software Engineer contract
    Wells Fargo

    Designed the architecture of web-based brokerage applications on a three-tier design, built for scale, load balancing and failover. Added monitoring and alerting at each tier and wrote the load test plans for the nationwide rollout.

What I work on

Load testing Stress testing Performance testing Peak-traffic readiness Capacity planning Performance tuning & profiling Benchmarking Web performance engineering Synthetic monitoring Alerting & monitoring design

Writing

I've been writing about web performance since 2013, first on the Dotcom-Monitor blog and from 2017 to 2020 also on the Dotcom-Tools web performance blog. A selection:

Load testing & web performance Dotcom-Monitor blog

Page speed Dotcom-Tools web performance blog, as Matt Schmitz

Full archives: Dotcom-Monitor → · Dotcom-Tools →

What I'm posting about LinkedIn

  • Getting ecommerce checkout ready for Black Friday, including the new AI surfaces on the peak checklist
  • AI shopping agents, and why a page that works for a person can still fail for an agent
  • Partial outages, where nothing is technically broken but customers still can't get through
  • Alert noise: what a "small" false alarm rate costs an on-call team
  • Third-party changes, like payment provider updates and Shopify Scripts going away, that break checkout overnight

Read my posts on LinkedIn →

Education

University of Minnesota, B.S. in Computer Engineering

Elsewhere

Disclosure

I work for a vendor. I lead load and performance testing at LoadView, and Dotcom-Monitor is its sister company. Read anything I write about testing or monitoring tools with that in mind. When I mention other vendors' products, check the details with the vendor.