Ryan Rickerts

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Software Engineer | Solutions Architect

My Github profile: theRocket Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham — Photos by Matt Curtis

Professional Summary

A polyglot programmer building reliable, flexible, and secure software systems. I enjoy the problem definition, planning, and pitching of solutions, then contribute significantly to the development and final delivery of complex systems. Maintenance, deployments, and upgrades, too!

Section Jumps:

About Me

Work History

Academic Projects

Volunteer Efforts

My preferred roles are:

About Me:

I’ve had a strong fascination with math and engineering topics since an early age. I remember witnessing the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion while at elementary school in 3rd grade. In that moment, I knew I wanted to build amazing and sophisticated things that could help advance humanity, yet ones that wouldn’t break and cause harm to living things. By 5th grade, I was embarking on a project with a friend to build a bicycle-powered submersible for exploring Lake Coeur d’Alene, à la James Cameron’s quest to reach the Challenger Deep.

I graduated from high school in 1995 in Cd’A, ID, a place where the internet and computers were not readily available to someone at my family’s income level. Fast forward to my undergraduate years at Western Washington University, where I was studying engineering technology and advanced mathematics. I took a required entry level course in programming languages (C++), and something clicked. The coding assignments were challenging, but I was good at it and I found it satisfying to create something tangible that just worked. I soon switched majors to Math/C.S. and graduated with a Bachelors of Science in 2005.

Simultaneously, in 2002, I started the WWU Cycling Team which involved recruiting members, organizing rides, designing jerseys, onboarding sponsors, pitching budgets to the university Sports Club administrators, training and traveling throughout the entire Northwest region to compete, hosting multi-day race events, and maintaining the team website. Within three years, I had built the first cycling team at WWU to qualify for USA Road Nationals in 2005, where I also competed. My teammates placed 1st and 2nd in the Division 2 road race.

My first endeavors in the professional realm were automating 3D models in SolidWorks using VB.NET, web app development with ASP.NET and MySQL as part of a consultancy team, and other front-end framework development with Ruby on Rails. I dabbled in graphic design with Photoshop and Illustrator.

In 2008, I was hired as a programmer at Saturna Capital, a local financial investment firm. Over the course of 12 years, I maintained then converted their internal customer and asset management functions off of a legacy database platform and onto more reliable, modern infrastructure (TypeScript/NodeJS/MySQL). Weaving fast-paced and cutting edge technology into a relatively conservative, highly secure, and heavily regulated environment has been one of my greatest challenges. I am happy their customers can now access and manage their investment portfolio online for a variety of account types (401k, Health Savings, Education Savings, etc.), as helping people save for the future and their family was highly rewarding. While I departed in July 2020 to pursue personal projects, my programs and architecture will likely run there (mostly) without flaw for years to come.

Concurrently, I founded and directed the Cascade Cross Series, a collection of local cyclocross races running from October to January. Over the course of a decade while working full time, I hosted over 60 races, sometimes two in a month. This required managing venue bookings, insurance acquisition, rider registration, equipment rentals and transport, volunteer coordination, course prep and buildout, finish line scoring, course teardown, results calculation and publishing. Of course, I also maintained a custom website and results database (a fork of Racing on Rails) with overall season calculations by category for hundreds of participants. This was rewarding mainly due to being outdoors on the weekend and seeing many smiling, muddy faces after they experienced a very intense workout with A LOT of community support and camaraderie. I passed the series on to a new director in 2018.

I left Saturna in 2020 and helped start a niche real estate concept for home co-buyers called Pairadime. It was my responsibility to get their IT systems off the ground as well as prototype the initial homebuyer services experience. I built a custom mortgage/home equity calculator for the browser in Javascript and set up data integration workflows for collecting potential client home purchase scenarios for crafting legal documents on their behalf.

On and off, starting in 2017 and finishing up while working at Pairadime in 2021, I completed my Master of Computer Science degree at UIUC. Afterwards, I continued assisting a C.S. professor on an amazing VR IoT project leading the team of volunteer student developers. You can read about some of my grad school projects below and find links to code on my Github profile.

From 2021 to 2023, I worked in a completely different industry, i.e. real-time and historic sports data. I built and maintained large, complex software systems for Sportradar US, based out of Minneapolis, MN. Most of our customers were major media companies publishing live sports scores and stats for all the big leagues: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, College Football, College Basketball, Nascar, and golf pro tours. My accomplishments there are detailed under Work History.

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Cyclocross Racing

Academic Projects

EV Charging Station Optimization Problem (2023):

Using python, statistical optimization techniques and the Google Maps API to find the ideal location for investing in new electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Source Code and README

Master of Computer Science - Data Science @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Incubator Project - VR IoT Deployment (2021):

Coursework:

CS 498 - Data Visualization:

Midterm Project: Coal Jobs & 2016 Voting Data on Tableau

Final Project: Coal Jobs & 2016 Voting Data in D3

CS 513 - Data Cleaning:

Final Project: Open Charge Map data in NestJS/MongoDB

CS 498 - Internet of Things:

Lab 4 Project: AWS IoT Things/GreenGrass Core and Lambda functions with ML for ECG analysis

Final Project: Home Security with NVIDIA Jetson GPUs and OpenCV Object Detection

CS 410 - Text Information Systems:

Final Project: Training FastText “Bag of Tricks” using Gluon & MXNet on AWS GPUs

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Cyclocross Racing

Work History

Senior Software Engineer at Sportradar US

100% Remote (2021-23)

CTO of Pairadime

100% Remote (2020-21)

Senior Software Engineer at Saturna Capital

Bellingham, WA and Remote (2008 - 2020)

Independent Web Developer

Bellingham, WA and Remote (2006 - 2012)

Junior Web Developer at Socrates Group

Bellingham, WA (2006 - 2008)

Programmer at Engineering Design Automation Inc.

Bellingham, WA (2004 - 2006)

Advanced Tutor at WWU Math Center

Bellingham, WA (2003 - 2005)

Accounting Clerk at Haggen, Inc.

Bellingham, WA (2000 - 2001)

Inventory Analyst at Coldwater Creek

Sandpoint, ID (1999 - 2000)

Customer Service Specialist at Coldwater Creek

Coeur d’Alene, ID (1997-1999)

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CX Remount

Volunteer Efforts

Founder/Director at Cascade Cross Series

Bellingham, WA (2006-2018)

Described above in About Me.

Founder/Director at WWU Cycling Team

Bellingham, WA (2003-2005)

Described above in About Me.

Greenways Advisory Committee

Bellingham, WA (2014-15)

Appointed seat on the Mayorial Advisory Committee.

Mt Baker Ski Area Events

Glacier, WA (2011-2016)

Race course set up, people handling, gatekeeping/scoring.

Whatcom Events

Bellingham, WA (2018-19)

Treasurer on non-profit board and chair of cycling race legs for a very large & historic relay race.

Bonner Country Search & Rescue

Sandpoint, ID (1998-1999)

Training exercises with horses, ATVs, and snowmobiles.

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