Welcome, friend! 👋 I'm Ryan (he/him). Nice to meet you!
You've stumbed upon (or perhaps found intentionally) the Github home of Ryan B. Harvey, alias nihonjinrxs or CodeAndData. You can find out more about my prior work and activities at codeanddata.codes.
I'm a fun-loving geek 
who is driven to create useful things 🏗️ (mostly with code) almost as much as I am called to teach 👨🏫 others how to do it themselves. I work hard to improve the lives of others in my free time and want to do so at work too 🤝. I enjoy diving into data and have been known to get lost in SQL at times. I'm passionate about clean, purposeful interfaces ✨ and joyous user experiences 🥰. I read lots of books 📚, but never seem to get through my reading list. I'm a happy husband 💑 and father of two 👨👩👧👦.
I've recently joined the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's Consumer Technology Department as a Sr. Software Engineer (contract) on the Fares Tech Team, where we're working to provide a more rider-friendly experience managing passes and farecards through the MyCharlie web app. In that role, I'm building web-based software using Elixir 
and Phoenix 
.
On the side, you might find me leading the Code for New Orleans volunteer brigade of Code for America, contributing to projects at Ruby for Good, or teaching Computer Science at Loyola University New Orleans. I also enjoy exploring robotics and IoT, Rust 
, video game randomizers, and computer generated music and art, though I don't claim to be good at any of those.
Prior work
Before MBTA, I was a Staff Software Engineer at Screencastify, a startup helping to make video-based instruction easy for teachers and school districts by providing a suite of tools for creation and editing of videos and assignment creation and tracking based on those videos. In that role, I did a variety of work to help the team operate effectively and the company be successful, including de-risking and prototyping new ideas and approaches, breaking down and planning engineering work, architecting large-scale changes to the code bases, identifying patterns and technologies that we can build on, coaching and mentoring colleagues, building software and supporting systems, and pairing and mobbing with fellow engineers to solve problems.
Before Screencastify, I worked at Healthify, a startup (since bought by WellSky) enabling organizations to address the social determinants of health by providing solutions for identifying social needs, searching for social services, and coordinating care with an integrated network of community partners to improve outcomes. While there, I worked on improving infrastructure and reporting availability, including launching a self-serve reporting feature for users of the app, primarily in Aptible, Docker 
and Ruby 
on Rails 
, with a bit of AWS , Python 
, JS 
, bash 
, dbt 
in the mix.
Prior to that, I was on the powerhouse Tech team at TED, where I worked on video engineering. In that role, I created (and still maintain) the Fessonia library to interface Node.js 
to the FFmpeg command line, and built our video encoding platform, working mostly in Node.js and Ruby on Rails . I also worked on the Analytics team and built out the backend recommendation system and API for the TED Recommends product using R 
, Node.js , and Golang 
. Before that, I was an engineer and engineering manager at the White House Office of Management and Budget and a computer scientist at the Social Security Administration.