Hello, I'm Ryan.
I've been building software professionally for more than 20 years and leading the teams that build it for much of that. I write about engineering leadership, delivery, and the craft of making things.
Recent writing
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Using Terraform to automate the creation and deprovisioning of AWS Member Accounts
We automate provisioning developer AWS sandbox accounts for our team at Sparkbox. These accounts are paid for by the parent organization. This gives our team full access to learn and prototype with all of AWS' services. We use Billing threshold notifications to keep things from…
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Making the Leap to Tech Lead
Building a healthy, sustainable development organization involves defining technical leadership. In 2019, I shared my thoughts on the tech lead role at the Solidus conference in Utah. Shortly after, I hiked City Creek Canyon and fell in love with the area.
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Traits of a Build and Deployment Pipeline
I believe that a team's release cadence has an incredible impact on their success and enjoyment. I wrote a little about the traits that make up a successful build and deploy pipeline for our team at Sparkbox.
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Architecting the Progressive Web
Building a great web is something the Sparkbox takes very personally. We built what we believe is one of the first RWD e-commerce sites. We constantly battle to improve performance while delivering a great experience, even for those with a terrible connection. We know we will…
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We forgot a Pull Request when Splitting a Repo
We’re working on a little skunk works project at the office and it involved splitting a Github repository in two. After a successful split, I noticed we’d missed a PR that now impacts both repositories. My head went to git format-patch <sha>, but I didn’t recall an option to…
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#startYourShift How to Make the Web Better
My contribution to theShift: a writing project designed to help us produce and consume unique perspectives on topics relevant to the web industry. A little over 2 years ago I joined Sparkbox. The focus on community, learning, and teaching were all contributors to that decision.…
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Installing Erlang 17 for Elixir 0.13 the easy way (Mac)
As of Elixir 0.13, you’ll need to have Erlang 17 installed. If you use brew to install erlang then elixir you’ll find this message awaiting you: The current Erlang brew formula is still at R16B03-1. BUT! the development version IS 17. So here you go: I’m sure this will change…
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Find Contact Shortcut in Skype for Mac
It’s well understood that Skype does not advocate usability, but I won’t take it anymore. They have some shortcuts, but they’re pretty pitiful. I’m a left hand dominant shortcut-er. Say what you will about me, but I can’t make my fingers use CMD+OPTION+F for finding a contact to…
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Hello Sparkbox!
Back when I started Cincy Clean Coders, it felt like the Dayton community was nearly nonexistent. It seemed like I needed to head down to the big city to attract a community of Clean Coders. Fast forward 2 years… the Cincy group has stopped meeting, Dayton Clean Coders is going…
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Elixir needs at least 4 JSON parsers
Elixir has, at the time of this post, 3 JSON parsers hosted on expm. Some time back I went looking for one and started exploring elixir-json, including the github repo. I loved how the encoder used protocols to implement the encoding of different types. It’s beautiful. Kudos to…