Ryan Rhea

Portland, OR · ryanrhea.com · goldenratio@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/goldenratio

I take products from idea to shipped: native Apple apps, the Python and Go services behind them, and the hardened Linux infrastructure they run on. Recent releases include Ad Zap, a privacy-first ad blocker on the App Store; Feedpunk, an AI-driven news aggregator that orchestrates multiple frontier models; Quot, a cross-platform stock app with its own backend; and curb, an HTTPS-only curl alternative distributed via Homebrew. Plus wayfinding apps for hospitals, airports, college campuses, and sports arenas at Meridian (now part of HPE).

The foundations run deep: Bash since the 1990s, Python since 2006. Linux and network operations going back to one of Google's first custom datacenters. Swift and Go picked up along the way as the products demanded them. A daily AI-coding practice ties it together and lets me move at the pace of a small team.

I'm looking for a role that values small teams, fast iteration, and shipping over process.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer · Meridian / Aruba Networks / HPE

November 2012 – Present · Portland, OR

Joined Meridian as employee #11. Stayed through acquisition by Aruba Networks and then Hewlett Packard Enterprise: same team, same products. Build and ship the Meridian apps for iOS and Android: indoor wayfinding for hospitals, airports, college campuses, and major sports arenas, driven by a map-centric CMS and a companion web SDK. Led the whitelabel team, which delivered the flagship app re-skinned and customized for dozens of enterprise customers, each published into the customer's own App Store and Play Store presence, and owned the release pipeline that made that repeatable. Primary contact for DNS, certificate management, and cloud provisioning across Meridian services.

Datacenter Tech II → III, Network Interrupts Team Lead · Google

October 2006 – January 2012 · The Dalles, OR

Helped build out one of Google's first custom datacenters along the Columbia River, a frontier engineering environment where scripts ran fleets and on-call meant something. Led deployments of cluster networking fabrics and a petabyte-scale tape backup system. Maintained network gear across Northwest datacenters and points-of-presence. Wrote Python and Bash automation for routine sysadmin work and team tooling. Triaged and routed multiple ticket queues. Received an Impact Award from Google's Executive Management Group in 2008.

Information Systems Manager · Portland Art Museum

August 2002 – October 2006 · Portland, OR

Ran IT for 200+ staff across 120 mixed Windows and Mac clients. Managed the IT team, helpdesk processes, and third-party vendors. Designed and deployed the multi-building network for the museum's 2005 expansion. Administered the museum's Blackbaud systems (Raiser's Edge donor management and Financial Edge accounting). Overhauled security infrastructure and policy, and owned the technology budget end to end: needs assessment, vendor selection, and all IT purchasing.

IT Manager · DOC Machine Tool Services

June 1999 – August 2002 · Rock Hill, SC

First job, started while in college, reporting directly to the president. Owned hardware, software, security, training, and hiring across the company. Wrote custom software to automate office work and business reporting (C++, Visual Basic, Perl), and ran company-wide email, remote access, and custom firewalls across platforms.

Recent work

Ad Zap: Privacy-first Safari content blocker, live on the App Store. One-step setup, no telemetry, no special permissions. Swift, SwiftUI, Safari content blocker extension.

Feedpunk: AI-driven daily news briefing. ~500 articles across ~15 sources, organized by topic, summarized through a routing layer that enables experimentation with multiple frontier large language models. Python, FastAPI, multi-model LLM orchestration.

Quot: Native stock-quote app for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, backed by a FastAPI service with multi-provider failover and SQLite caching. Sign in with Apple, real-time quotes, multi-watchlist charts. SwiftUI, FastAPI, Python, SQLite, JWT.

curb: A modern, HTTPS-only alternative to curl and wget, written in Go using only the standard library. Picks the right behavior automatically (stream JSON to a human, save binaries to disk), and its --vet mode runs curl | sh installers through security sieves (heuristic smell tests, trust-on-first-use SHA-256 pinning) before a single byte reaches a shell. Shipped via Homebrew and prebuilt macOS/Linux releases on GitHub. Go, GoReleaser.

pdq: A minimal single-binary web server in Go using only the standard library. Serves multiple domains from one tiny config file, with automatic HTTPS, TLS 1.3 only, and a hardened systemd unit. Scores an A at SSL Labs with zero configuration. Go, TLS, systemd.

Infrastructure as code: A small fleet of VPS hosts running Mastodon, Forgejo, Caddy, and friends. Provisioned end-to-end by Ansible playbooks: Ubuntu Pro, hardened sshd (post-quantum key exchange, GSSAPI off, obscured keystroke timing), unattended security upgrades, sysctl tuning, Tailscale, custom dotfiles. Idempotent, fully qualified modules, the works. Ansible, Bash, systemd, Caddy, Postgres.

What I do well

Ship Apple-platform apps end-to-end. Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit. Apps, extensions, Safari content blockers, custom keyboards. App Store publishing, code signing, App Review, Sign in with Apple, on-device ML, App Groups, Keychain, universal builds across iOS / iPadOS / macOS. A decade of getting apps through Apple's review cycle.

Write Go, Python, and Bash for everything that isn't iOS. Python since the mid-2000s. Bash since before that. Go when the answer should be one static binary with no dependency tree: curb and pdq are both standard-library-only by design. uv for Python projects, FastAPI for services, SQLite for state, systemd for units.

Run real systems. Linux going back to the late 1990s. Helped build out one of Google's first custom datacenters (Impact Award from Executive Management Group, 2008). Today that means owning DNS, certificate management, and cloud provisioning for Meridian services at HPE, and keeping my own fleet of servers patched, hardened, and reliable.

Build backends and APIs. Python / FastAPI / SQLite / Caddy, and single-binary Go servers terminating their own TLS. REST services with multi-provider failover and intelligent caching. Things that don't fall over.

Use AI as engineering infrastructure. Multi-model orchestration in shipped projects (Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, OpenRouter) with my own routing and tool-use layers. Agentic loops with extensible tool calling: news, weather, market data, custom personas. Prompt engineering, model evaluation, voice/persona design. I use Claude Code and similar agents daily as part of how I ship; that practice is what lets one engineer move like a small team.

Default to privacy and security. Every product I ship (curb, Ad Zap, Quot, Feedpunk) collects no telemetry, requests minimum permissions, and runs as much as possible on the device or my own infrastructure. It is a posture, not a feature.

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy and Religious Studies · Minor in Computer Science · Winthrop University · 2002.

Thirty years of professional engineering practice. Still curious. Last updated July 2026.