Matt Nelson

About

Me smiling in front of a bookcase.

I'm a software engineering manager in Providence, Rhode Island.

I lead the team behind Panorama, Precision Planting's cloud platform for farm data. Growers and dealers use it to see what their equipment is doing, plan what that equipment does next, and ask Aurora, its AI agent, questions about their operations. My team of about ten works across web, mobile, cloud, and C++ data services. I also help set the product's direction, so I spend a lot of my time with the people who use it.

I joined Precision Planting in 2021 and became the platform's first web developer in 2022, then its technical lead through its launches in 2023 and 2024. I've led the team since late 2024, and I still build core systems myself.

A winding road to software

I came to engineering from the humanities. I earned a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I wrote about modern Sanskrit and postcolonial poetry and taught literature, writing, and Sanskrit. A film-studies research project moved me toward software. I built the database and web app that replaced its spreadsheets, and then I kept going.

I had no background in agriculture when I started, and growers have taught me most of what I now know about it.

Talks and interviews