About

Abstract

Ryan McDevitt is a perpetually curious philomath. A self taught, full stack software engineer by trade, he enjoys exploring all areas of life and knowledge from cooking to 3d printing to soccer to home automation.

Background

The son of an Irish Chemcial Engineer and a Filipina Software Engineer, Ryan grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. He has one younger brother, Shane, his junior by 5 years. At the age of 5, his family moved to Singapore, and over their 4 year stay there, Ryan got to see the world; traveling all over South-East Asia, Australia, and Europe.

Schooling

Upon returning from Singapore, Ryan attended Visitation BVM Catholic school in Trooper PA. During his time there, he participated in the Christopher Columbus Awards, a national science fair that challenges middle school students to use the science method to solve problems in their community. He, his cousin, and a few of her friends entered the competition with the idea of a handheld scanner that could detect common food allergies in packaged foods. Their idea first was selected as 1 of 8 finalists amongst 300 teams nationwide, then went on to win the grand prize; the $25,000 Christopher Columbus Community Grant to be used to implement the idea.

He attended LaSalle College High School in Wyndmoor, PA. Ryan participated in the Lab Manager Program, Pep Band, and the Engineering Club. He went on to study at Stevens Institute of Technology for Computer Engineering.

Career

After a year and a half of studying at Stevens, Ryan dropped out to pursue a startup job with a California company working to build a meal and nutrition planner. He learned PHP, Python and MySQL to help the backend team build out the application.

After the startup went under, he went to work for his best friends family business, a bindery. He brought his programming knowledge to the aging paper industry and quickly took over as the companies’ Director of Research and Development. During this time, he used modern technologies to add new capabilities to the companies lineup. His new found department founded the Imaging Department and the Data Processing Department, as well developing a internal ERP and warehousing systems. They experimented with RFID tracking, 3D printing high speed image recognition, and many more technologies.

Focusing on his software career, his next position was as a frontend software engineer with Nuix. He worked on a team building out a backboneJS frontend on top of a powerful unstructured search engine.

Not long after moving to Nuix and finding his stride in software engineering, he was hired by Sungard Consulting Services to work as a Senior Software Engineering Consultant at Comcast. While at Comcast he worked on a variety of projects including TVGoWeb, CloudTV, a few prototypes of onboarding, and the rewrite of MyAccount. He led teams in technologies including Ruby on Rails, BackboneJS, Polymer, and AngularJS.

His next position was as a Senior Software Engineer at Jornaya. He was brought on to learn and maintain a Scala application, but his talents in python and javascript changed that direction into assisting some of the other teams on python projects and leading the team responsible for Jornaya’s script, which runs on more than 30,000 publisher sites.