Northwood Labs is an incubator for security and reliability tooling. (This is currently a side-hustle, not a full-time gig.)It is a tiny company based in Colorado who thinks that software engineering, site reliability, operations, and cybersecurity are all parts of the same whole. We want to empower teams to build quality software and reliable services, teach where there are knowledge gaps, and make it possible for every user to have access to the best in security.Historically, most of the tools built to address these areas have done a poor job of integrating across all relevant disciplines, and can also cost a small fortune in order to help teams ensure their products and services are well-built, reliable, and secure.

Assumed a role influencing the technical direction of the entire organization. Collaborated closely with members of the Cloud Center of Excellence, Reliability Engineering, Cybersecurity, Networking, and Application Development teams to prevent “Ivory Tower Syndrome.” Ensured a focus on real-world, actionable feedback and provided strategic direction aligned with practical needs.* Documentation and Training: Continued to ensure that people could continue to learn about new topics without requiring any specific human to become a bottleneck.* AWS Organizations and Control Tower: Continued to be involved in the oversight and direction of our AWS stack, security, guardrails, and more.* Cross-Cloud Collaboration: Collaborated with peers focusing on Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Deepened understanding of our cloud fabric to enable high-performance networking across multiple clouds. Identified opportunities to extend the security measures and guardrails developed for AWS to other cloud platforms. Trained peers on the effective use of Terraform for cloud management.

Transitioned from Engineering Manager to a strategic technical leadership role, focusing on projects I'd initiated. Planned the product roadmap for those projects and integrated solutions into our highly heterogeneous application ecosystem.* Documentation: Prolific documentarian. Documentation is worth 50% of your grade.* AWS Control Tower: Lowered costs and increased control over account guardrails. Enabled automated provisioning of new accounts, and developed smoke tests as a post-provisioning validation step.* Base AMIs: Leveraged insights from Packer, CIS Benchmarks, security patching, and the specific needs of internal AMI customers to develop a unified build pipeline integrating best practices.* Streamlining: Integrated Terraform, Monitoring-as-Code, Base AMIs, and custom security tooling to empower application teams. Enabled deployment of Docker images with minimal configuration to Amazon ECS clusters, incorporating best practices, infrastructure monitoring, and operational tooling.* Prism: Developed custom security and operational tooling where off-the-shelf tools wouldn't give us what we needed. ±200 AWS accounts. Enabled teams to be involved in improving their infrastructure.* Automation for Artifactory: Rebuilt our Artifactory cluster with a “cattle, not pets” approach. Rewrote configurations using Terraform to eliminate manual configurations. Reduced human error, improved security posture, increased consistency, leading to a better developer experience.* Token Vending Machine: Developed a Token Vending Machine to enable continuous token and password rotation for our engineering teams, providing a "push-button, receive-token" solution. Leveraged AWS Secrets Manager, Lambda, KMS, IAM policies, and custom CLI software written in Go.* ARM64 Adoption: Prepared the organization for the adoption of AWS Graviton (ARM64) CPUs for cost optimization, ensuring all components were in place for seamless integration.

Owned and served as the key decision-maker in development of a core platform for company-wide, reliability-focused projects. As development teams transitioned to Full-Cycle Development, led the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in addressing macro-oriented problems affecting over 75 decentralized, heterogeneous engineering teams across the company. These initiatives empowered greater self-service for engineering teams, enabling them to move faster without reinventing the wheel.* ECS-optimized Base AMI: Customized the AWS-provided AMIs to comply with Level-2 CIS Guidelines for both Amazon Linux and Docker. Achieved high levels of opt-in adoption, enhancing confidence among cybersecurity and operations organizations in the product development teams.* Prism: Developed an executive dashboard that significantly enhanced visibility into the security and operational configurations of our hundreds of AWS accounts.* Monitoring-as-Code: Leveraged Terraform and Go to streamline the generation and maintenance of dashboards and monitors in Datadog and New Relic across a large, heterogeneous range of applications.* Formed a leadership group to establish a rigorous process for developing, patching, distributing, and maintaining reusable Terraform modules utilized by numerous product development teams across the company.* Assumed engineering management responsibilities for the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) group in McGraw Hill’s Seattle office. Led initiatives to better integrate our office with the expanding SRE practice across all U.S. locations.* Revamped the Seattle SRE interview process to prioritize the recruitment of high-quality engineers with a 70/30 focus on software engineering (Dev) and systems operations (Ops), emphasizing strong leadership qualities.* Implemented a more collaborative SRE-style approach by closely integrating with development teams, effectively minimizing the practice of siloed hand-offs to operations teams.

Led the development of multiple Tier-1 services within the educational content authoring pipeline, leveraging technologies such as REST, GraphQL, API design, Amazon ECS, Docker, Terraform, ePubs, and security best practices. Provided the technical direction of these projects, promoted their adoption across the organization, provided comprehensive documentation, and offered ongoing guidance on adoption.* Lead the development of the authoring component of McGraw Hill’s SmartBook 2.0 product, and the internal system which indexes authored content, builds ePubs, and encodes images/video for McGraw Hill’s ePub CDN.* Initiated the adoption of continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), rapid deployment practices, and Docker containers. Championed "dogfooding" of new processes, resulting in deployments that were both more frequent and more reliable.* Introduced a more hands-on monitoring approach, enabling development teams to actively engage in their own operations rather than relying solely on third-party vendors used by other groups in the company. Achieved significantly lower Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) during incidents by implementing application-level metrics tracking and introducing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).* Served as a core team member in migrating all new infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Packer. Identified patterns across applications and initiated efforts to streamline infrastructure maintenance using shared, reusable Terraform modules.

Worked with author E.M. Baird on the book "Federal Probation Bible" (Paperback ISBN: 978-0-578-99269-3). Spent hundreds of hours over the course of a year performing multiple, deep-level revisions and rewrites of content, grammar, and voice.Performed all of the production work for the book, including typesetting and typography, (re-)creation of all graphs and images used in the book, integrating changes from several third-party reviewers, and working with a few printer candidates on formatting of the print-ready file. Took cover artwork designed by a third-party for screen, and modified the various layers and color settings in Adobe Illustrator for print production.Proofed a physical copy of the book, and provided approval to the printer.

* Enhanced WePay's cloud infrastructure provisioning by optimizing update deployment processes and managing security patches. Improved application and infrastructure monitoring. Streamlined the planning, development, deployment, and maintenance of new microservices throughout the company.* Led a cross-company initiative to upgrade the monolithic application's software stack from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6. Facilitated cross-team collaboration among all major engineering teams and QA departments. Managed the replacement of over 200 servers across multiple environments, achieving zero customer-facing downtime.* Maintainer of multiple tier-1 systems including Artifactory, GitHub Enterprise, Toran Proxy, and Phabricator.

* Developed new API endpoints to help expand WePay’s business and support its partners.* Was instrumental in designing/developing WePay’s MFA-as-a-Service offering (“System and Methods for User Authentication across Multiple Domains” (US15042104; Pending)).* Enhanced the security of WePay's products by coordinating fixes with cross-functional teams while managing competing priorities. Personally resolved numerous issues to ensure product integrity and protect customer data.

* Hired by Amazon to work on the AWS SDK for PHP after they hard-forked my open-source CloudFusion project. Invested heavily in supporting developers by actively listening to their needs, engaging with the community, and representing AWS in PHP-related industry groups.* Collaborated with the AWS Elastic Beanstalk team to provide PHP support for the platform, which launched in March 2012. Worked closely with the PHP community to determine a PHP container configuration that would accommodate the needs of the broadest range of developers. Developed a rigorous internal test suite for testing containers, which became the foundation for testing by other language-specific teams. Contributed early input on adding support for git push deployments.* Played a key role in the creation and development of the AWS SDK for PHP v2, incorporating significant changes in the PHP language and community since CloudFusion was first written in 2005. Contributed to the successful launch of the new SDK in November 2012.* Collaborated with the AWS Design team on the AWS Management Console, leveraging experience as a web developer and software engineer to bridge the gap between design and engineering disciplines. Contributed to building a high-quality, robust, and user-friendly console for interacting with Amazon Web ServicesCultural achievements:* AWS development blogs and Twitter accounts* SDKs for Browsers and Node.js* Publishing SDKs on GitHub* Open-sourcing SDKs with Apache 2.0 license* Development of non-secret SDK features in the open* https://github.com/awslabs existing* Ability for employees to answer AWS questions on StackOverflow* Reusable UI building blocks for creating AWS service consoles* Spent 3 years pitching the idea behind AWS Lambda to anyone at AWS who would listen* Got the Console, SDK, and Development Tools teams to stop using the same sets of AWS root credentials across the organization* Invented the idea of "waiter" functions for the SDKs and CLI

(Company was 'Rearden Commerce' when I worked there.)* Supported the User Experience team, Java developers, and widget development teams by prototyping new features and integrating them into existing systems.* Migrated JavaScript code from older frameworks to the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), enhancing codebase maintainability.* Educated teams on the value of high-quality front-end code, placing a strong emphasis on writing code with better performance, faster load times, and improved accessibility across all projects.

* Developed CloudFusion, a fast and powerful PHP toolkit for rapidly building cloud-based web applications. Prioritized design decisions that enhanced performance, ease of use, and overall usability. Aimed to provide a high-performance developer toolkit for leveraging Amazon's cloud infrastructure, fostering community growth, and building useful, user-centric applications based on the toolkit.* Amazon Web Services hired me and hard-forked this project in 2010. It became the AWS SDK for PHP.

WarpShare worked to bridge the gap between digital piracy and the economic models of RIAA and MPAA industry groups. Aimed to support musical artists and copyright holders by exploring innovative ways to derive value from piracy. Recognized that piracy could not be entirely eliminated and analyzed the shortcomings of traditional anti-piracy efforts by the MPAA and RIAA.* Developed CleerPeer, an efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol known as the "Hive-based Peer-to-Peer Network" (US Patent US8103870B2), which improved upon the performance and efficiency of existing protocols like BitTorrent. Addressed and solved multiple performance and efficiency issues present in the original BitTorrent protocol.* Contributed to early concepts in peer-to-peer (P2P) digital content delivery with CleerPeer (c. 2007). These ideas have since been realized in technologies like IPFS, which empowers P2P-based distribution of digital content.* Researched machine learning-powered content identification methods (c. 2007), which have since been successfully adopted by companies such as YouTube.* Designed a social network focused around digital media, incorporating gamification elements to enhance tagging and content improvement over automated data sources. Recognized that users enjoy keeping track of music, movies, and TV shows, discovering similar content, and sharing with friends.* Pioneered an innovative business model (c. 2008) enabling users and brands to support and sponsor content through interactive advertising integrated into the media experience (e.g., content-targeted advertising, a smarter version of sponsorships).* Didn't foresee the shift from piracy to streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, and Netflix.* Failed because: team was too small; team lacked the required expertise in advertising; team lacked the required expertise in machine learning; funding dried up as the US entered the 2007 credit crisis; tried to do too much up-front; early mistakes in budgeting.

* Creator, evangelist, and co-developer of the SimplePie project — a PHP library that enables web developers to simply and easily integrate news feeds into their websites and web applications.* After recruiting additional development resources in June 2005, Ryan began to shift from a primarily development-focused role to a primarily people-focused role, where he currently works to ensure that people are aware of, and can easily use SimplePie through support, documentation, tutorials, plugins, and evangelism.* SimplePie was integrated into WordPress, Drupal, MODx, and several other large projects written in PHP. If you've ever used WordPress since 2006, you've used SimplePie with or without knowing it.

* As a freelance developer, Ryan leverages a deep understanding of best practices in front-end development, layout and design, information architecture, usability, accessibility, and web culture to provide value to clients. He provides guidance to people and teams about how to maintain best practices after the project ends.* Took on various gigs to stay afloat when WarpShare was broke during the credit crisis.

* Lead the front-end development of the Spring 2008 re-launch of the Yahoo! Messenger website. He collaborated with a core team of developers to provide increased usability, accessibility, organic search engine optimization (SEO), and simplified maintenance, resulting in exceptionally tuned performance for 29 locales.* Involved in tuning the front-end stack for performance, where they employed semantically valid HTML/CSS, caching, gzipping, image spriting, code minification, and reduced HTTP requests, resulting in exceptional performance.

* Core member of the team tasked with re-building the company intranet site around Oracle Portal. His time was spent writing and discussing functional and technical documentation, conducting usability interviews, and creating a fresh UI that employed user-centered design principles, web standards, and fancy new AJAX tech.* Member of the Endora Marketing Team, which was geared towards spreading information about the company's move to Oracle's ERP software. In that capacity, Ryan maintained the Endora website, wrote numerous articles for the monthly newsletter, interviewed project leads, and created fun little ERP-related polls to help drive interest in the project (essentially internal marketing).* Worked with the eBusiness team to improve maintenance and development for the UI of the GlobalSource project. He also re-engineered the Stryker Endoscopy public site to follow modern web standards, and built a PHP-based templating system for the site that significantly sped up development.

(Company was 'Digital Impact' when I worked there.)* Ryan coordinated with Campaign Managers on email campaign integration, with responsibility for email content and change requests, and ensuring that the content format was consistent with client requirements. He performed the quality tracking and reporting of campaign integration-related metrics, and consulted and troubleshot on text and HTML templates.* Ryan maintained HTML code guidelines, provided optimal design and processing, and provided suggestions for strategic and process improvements. He also acted as syndication expert for the internal RSS development team.* Ryan's client experience included Banana Republic, SBC (now AT&T), Hewlett Packard (HP), Sony Style, Lexus, MAC Make-up.