{"meta": {"version": 1, "updated": "2026-07-23"}, "basics": {"name": "Ryan James Brooks", "label": "Director, Composer, Architect", "tagline": "{{years_since 2007}} years across enterprise IT, DevOps, security, and machine learning - the last {{years_since 2019}} spent building open source frameworks, publishing research, and creating software, all in public.", "email": "ryanjbrooks11@gmail.com", "phone": "281-299-2361", "location": "Houston, Texas", "links": [{"label": "github.com/Vectorrent", "url": "https://github.com/Vectorrent"}, {"label": "linkedin.com/in/ryan-j-brooks", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-j-brooks"}]}, "sections": [{"id": "overview", "title": "overview", "type": "prose", "content": ["Versatile and effective decision-maker offering a breadth of experience within complex domains; from technical leadership, to incident response, to machine learning, programming and software engineering. Able to orchestrate large-scale efforts on a limited budget; leverages business, technical, and financial expertise to effectively collaborate with executives, team members, and the community.", "That experience was earned in regulated, high-stakes environments - healthcare, corrections, public education, and banking - and at every scale, from a 3-person service desk to a global AWS network of thousands of servers.", "The portfolio below is not aspirational - every project is public, solo-authored unless noted, and measurable in commits. Ask me about any of it."]}, {"id": "highlights", "title": "highlights", "type": "cards", "note": "All projects are open source and active unless noted. Commit counts are sole-author unless stated otherwise.", "items": [{"name": "Praxis", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/praxis", "period": "2024 - present", "stack": ["Python", "PyTorch", "Lightning", "Flask", "JavaScript", "Docker"], "description": "A from-scratch language-model research framework: a transformers-compatible model stack organized around 48 pluggable registries, so nearly every component - attention, routing, memory, embeddings, losses, optimizers - swaps by CLI flag. Implements dozens of recent papers (InfiniAttention, Titans memory, Mixture-of-Depths, differential attention, GRPO) plus original architectures.", "highlights": ["~140,000 lines of Python across 678 files; ~2,450 commits of near-daily solo development since August 2024.", "Checkpoints are drop-in HuggingFace compatible; models and custom tokenizers published under the UNSAFE namespace.", "Ships a zero-framework vanilla-JS training dashboard, a browser-tab distributed-training swarm, and ten conditionally loaded integrations (Hivemind, Discord, Cloudflare, W&B, more).", "Auto-generates its own LaTeX research paper from live code and run data, so the paper can never drift from the source."]}, {"name": "Platformer", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/platformer", "period": "2025 - present", "stack": ["Terraform", "AWS", "Python", "Bash", "Ansible", "Packer", "Kubernetes"], "description": "A novel Terraform framework for multi-account, multi-region infrastructure: services enable declaratively through composable YAML \"state fragments,\" and consumer modules declare their needs while a root orchestrator auto-wires providers (dependency inversion, in HCL).", "highlights": ["Distilled from production experience managing thousands of EC2 instances across a global, multi-account medical-imaging network.", "~20,600 lines of Terraform across 27 modules, plus a native terraform-test suite and 98 markdown docs.", "Salt-inspired multi-account targeting DSL drives a GitHub Actions account-by-region deployment matrix.", "An \"archivist\" module scrubs and versions the codebase on every apply - which is how the repo was safely open-sourced."]}, {"name": "Ghost", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/praxis/tree/main/axis/ghost", "period": "2025 - present", "stack": ["Godot 4", "GDScript"], "description": "A procedural, deterministic music visualizer: point it at an audio file and it renders a show seeded by the audio's own fingerprint - the same song always produces the same visuals. No generative AI in the render path.", "highlights": ["~30,000 lines of GDScript; 43+ visualizer scenes, a composable physics force registry, and a software-3D forced-perspective pipeline with depth sorting.", "Headless video export at up to 4K with synced audio, plus a built-in chroma-key masking editor with undo/redo and multi-track lanes."], "media": [{"title": "Like Clockwork", "youtube": "-b2M7VSYIFU", "note": "No AI was used in this song or video."}]}, {"name": "ode", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/ode", "period": "2024", "stack": ["JavaScript", "TensorFlow.js"], "description": "Language models from scratch, in JavaScript: transformers, RNNs and state-space models with custom optimizers (AdamW, Lion, Prodigy), samplers (top-k/top-p/Mirostat), tokenizers, and a hand-rolled training loop. 1,090 commits."}, {"name": "vtx", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/vtx", "period": "2023 - 2024", "stack": ["Python", "Docker", "Petals", "Hivemind"], "description": "A declarative, Dockerized machine-learning experimentation platform: YAML-defined training and inference of small models across architectures, with distributed learning over Petals and Hivemind, bot integrations, and a 42-area experiment lab. 1,692 commits over two years."}, {"name": "src.eco", "url": "https://src.eco", "period": "2020 - present", "stack": ["TypeScript", "GUN", "Tone.js", "Cloudflare", "Terraform"], "description": "A decentralized, peer-to-peer communications platform and AI sandbox, live since 2020. Browser-native P2P data over GUN, generative audio, and connections into the rest of this portfolio's model-serving ecosystem."}, {"name": "ext", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/ext", "period": "2024", "stack": ["JavaScript", "Chrome MV3"], "description": "A browser extension for large-scale synthetic training-data collection - service worker, content scripts, and popup UI. Used by the community to feed the datasets behind the models above."}]}, {"id": "experience", "title": "experience", "type": "timeline", "items": [{"role": "Full Stack Developer (Self-employed)", "title": "Full Stack Developer", "org": "Original Design", "location": "Houston, Texas", "start": "Nov 2019", "end": "present", "bullets": ["Self-employed; deep, sustained focus on software development, DevOps, AI and data science.", "Architect of several dozen open source projects, including API servers, AI agents, ML frameworks, and SaaS/social media integrations (see highlights)."]}, {"role": "Platform Architect", "title": "Platform Architect", "org": "Intelerad Medical Systems", "location": "Montreal, Quebec (remote)", "start": "Apr 2025", "end": "Mar 2026", "bullets": ["Designed, wrote, and deployed automated tooling supporting backend infrastructure across a global, multi-account AWS network of thousands of EC2 instances (medical imaging, HIPAA).", "Built self-service development processes with Python, Terraform, Kubernetes and AWS - the experience that seeded Platformer (see highlights).", "Provided ML adoption support and guidance to multiple teams, building novel proofs-of-concept.", "Participated in the company's first hackathon, and won."]}, {"role": "Senior DevOps Engineer", "title": "Senior DevOps Engineer", "org": "Aventiv Technologies", "location": "Houston, Texas", "start": "Jun 2019", "end": "Nov 2019", "bullets": ["Worked within Satellite Tracking of People (STOP) - a FISMA-adjacent electronic-monitoring platform serving the corrections system - and brought all of its Windows and Linux servers under configuration management.", "Translated internal documentation into an ITIL-inspired service portfolio and knowledge base.", "Delivered a multi-year \"Roadmap to DevOps\" strategy; developed and taught an \"Intro to DevOps\" course for tier-1 employees."]}, {"role": "Consultant, Identity and Access Management", "title": "IAM Consultant", "org": "CyberDefenses", "location": "Houston, Texas", "start": "2017", "end": "2019", "bullets": ["Hired into the security operations center (SOC); promoted to the IAM team soon after.", "Formally trained in Identity and Access Management ecosystems, tooling, and processes; acted as the unit's DevOps champion.", "Consulted for clients in regulated industries, including banks and public school districts.", "Built customer automation projects, including a password leak-detection system for a large public school district, integrated with RapidIdentity."]}, {"role": "Manager of Information Systems", "title": "Manager of Information Systems", "org": "American Surgical Professionals", "location": "Houston, Texas", "start": "2012", "end": "2017", "bullets": ["Managed a 3-person IT service desk; lead technical authority for 5 years while the company grew from 75 to ~400 employees.", "Architect of all network infrastructure, endpoint management, software delivery and user-provisioning processes.", "Responsible for business continuity, security, HIPAA compliance, and nearly every other aspect of IT in a healthcare company."]}, {"role": "Field Support Technician", "title": "Field Support Technician", "org": "Wright Business Technologies", "location": "Houston, Texas", "start": "2010", "end": "2012", "bullets": ["Tier-2 support and customer account manager within a Managed Service Provider; promoted from help desk to field technician with dedicated on-site customers."]}, {"role": "IT Technician", "title": "IT Technician", "org": "Microtech Services", "location": "Holt, Michigan", "start": "2007", "end": "2010", "description": "The origin story: a workbench in a backroom storage area, hemmed in by dot matrix printers, beige towers, and hand-me-down servers - in an era before you could simply search for the answer. When something broke, you read the manual, opened the case, and worked the problem. Every job since has been this one, at larger scale.", "bullets": ["Hardware and software support for small-town clients; kept aging printers, point-of-sale machines, and servers alive long past their warranties.", "Installed wireless radios and satellite WAN links, bringing connectivity to rural areas the broadband maps had skipped."]}]}, {"id": "open-source", "title": "open-source", "type": "list", "note": "Upstream contributions, verifiable in each project's history.", "items": ["**Hivemind** (learning@home): ~54 commits - Python 3.13 support, pydantic 2 migration, GPU backward-pass fixes for mixture-of-experts layers, averager race-condition fixes.", "**lightning-Hivemind**: maintainer-level work on the Lightning HivemindStrategy - IPFS integration, persistent peer identities, pydantic migration.", "**Meta byte-latent transformer (blt)**: 23 commits - packaged bytelatent as an installable module, flex-attention toggle, realtime entropy-patching fix, gradient-flow fixes.", "**pytorch_optimizer**: OrthoGrad state-management and AdamG stability fixes, TRAC fixes.", "**TensorFlow.js**: GELU activations and Random* preprocessing layers.", "**IBM ModuleFormer**: transformers activation functions, gradient checkpointing support.", "**HuggingFace transformers**: merged SiglipVisionModel fix.", "**TokenMonster**: Node.js 18+ compatibility fix."]}, {"id": "achievements", "title": "achievements", "type": "list", "note": "A sampling of enterprise-scale work, from present-day cloud fleets back through two decades of infrastructure ownership.", "items": ["Automated infrastructure at the scale of thousands of EC2 instances - a global, multi-account, multi-region AWS network - then distilled that experience into Platformer, an open source Terraform framework anyone can inspect (see highlights).", "Delivered in regulated, high-stakes environments across four industries - healthcare (HIPAA, at a global medical-imaging platform and a surgical services company), a FISMA-adjacent electronic-monitoring platform serving the corrections system, public school districts, and banks.", "Designed, deployed and ran a clustered private cloud - Hyper-V, a storage area network, fault-tolerant networking, and 100+ virtual machines (2012-2017, built on-premise and single-handedly).", "Built a full desktop provisioning and patch-management architecture (SCCM PXE imaging, WSUS, BitLocker), and managed MDM for hundreds of devices via Apple DEP, MaaS360, and Intune.", "Led large-scale migrations, including GE Centricity for healthcare practice management and on-premise Exchange to Office 365.", "Built an end-to-end monitoring stack - Elasticsearch logging, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, GitLab pipelines - on Kubernetes, provisioned into AWS via Terraform.", "Developed a clustered secrets-management solution with HashiCorp Vault, deployed into Azure; automated Oracle secret rotation.", "Managed point-to-point VPN infrastructure across remote offices (Cisco, Meraki, Sophos, WatchGuard, Ubiquiti) and unified a dozen systems behind SAML single sign-on with AD Federation Services.", "Implemented ITIL-inspired service desks with user-facing service portfolios, twice, at different companies (Jira Service Desk, Confluence).", "Ran large-scale configuration management with Salt, Ansible, and AWS Systems Manager; built consultant development stacks with Vagrant and Docker.", "Designed disaster-recovery strategies spanning Veeam on-site and off-site backups and offline nightly tape rotation.", "Built a binary classification pipeline that labels videos, detects events with AI, and cuts automated clips as output."]}, {"id": "skills", "title": "skills", "type": "groups", "groups": [{"name": "Machine learning", "items": ["Natural Language Processing", "Transformer architectures (from scratch)", "Pre-training and fine-tuning", "RL post-training", "Evaluation and benchmarks", "Dataset pipelines and tokenizers"]}, {"name": "Cloud and infrastructure", "items": ["AWS", "Azure", "Terraform", "Kubernetes", "Docker", "Infrastructure-as-code", "Networking", "Storage Area Networks", "Virtualization"]}, {"name": "DevOps", "items": ["CI/CD", "Configuration management (Salt", "Ansible)", "Release management", "GitOps", "Monitoring (Prometheus", "Grafana", "Elasticsearch)", "Automation"]}, {"name": "Security and identity", "items": ["IAM (SailPoint IdentityIQ", "RapidIdentity", "MidPoint)", "SAML SSO", "HashiCorp Vault", "Information security", "Compliance"]}, {"name": "IT leadership", "items": ["IT Service Management (ITIL)", "Service desk", "Endpoint management and MDM", "Business continuity", "Project management"]}, {"name": "Software", "items": ["Full-stack engineering", "API and microservice design", "Godot game development", "Browser extensions", "Technical writing"]}]}, {"id": "languages", "title": "languages", "type": "columns", "items": ["Shell, Bash, PowerShell", "Python, TypeScript, GDScript, Rust, Scheme, Guile", "HTML, CSS, JavaScript", "YAML, JSON, TOML", "Jinja2, HCL, Helm, DSC and many other DSLs", "SQL, SurrealQL, ESQL, JQL, PromQL and other query languages", "Hundreds of other languages, syntaxes, frameworks and formats"]}, {"id": "writing-and-media", "title": "writing-and-media", "type": "cards", "items": [{"name": "A Blind Watchmaker: Harmonic Latent Spaces and the Geometry of Bias and Variance", "url": "https://github.com/0-5788719150923125/praxis/blob/main/research/main.pdf", "period": "2026", "stack": ["Research paper", "LaTeX"], "description": "A research paper on harmonic latent spaces - auto-generated from the Praxis codebase and live training runs by its \"pillars\" system, so figures, tables and component-gated prose always match the actual code."}, {"name": "Ephemeral Rift", "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX313HH9", "period": "2026", "stack": ["Book", "Amazon KDP"], "description": "\"A Book in Forty-Four Movements\" (as Pen & Ink). Literary fiction published on Amazon KDP in three editions - Kindle, softcover, and hardcover - built with a custom Python toolchain that renders ODT, PDF and EPUB editions from one source."}, {"name": "North Star - Fables for Fathers", "period": "2026", "stack": ["Book", "manuscript"], "description": "A complete ~31,000-word book of fables framed by a father and son; 18 chapters across two built editions, awaiting release."}, {"name": "The Charlatan", "url": "https://youtu.be/x9kmvIPrcbE", "period": "2026", "stack": ["Concept album", "music video direction"], "description": "A multi-movement rock opera (prologue plus three acts) spanning progressive metal, dark americana, and cosmic horror, with full cinematic music-video treatments.", "media": [{"title": "The Charlatan", "youtube": "x9kmvIPrcbE"}]}, {"name": "pen.university & ink.university", "url": "https://ink.src.eco", "period": "2022 - 2024", "stack": ["Hugo", "transmedia fiction"], "description": "Twin sites hosting a years-long transmedia fiction universe - poetry, short stories, theory essays, and the personas behind the published books."}, {"name": "The Arc", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@The-Arc", "period": "ongoing", "stack": ["YouTube"], "description": "Videos, music, and demos from the ecosystem above."}]}, {"id": "education", "title": "education", "type": "timeline", "items": [{"title": "Associate of Technology", "org": "Lansing Community College", "location": "Michigan", "period": "2010"}]}, {"id": "community", "title": "community", "type": "prose", "content": ["None of this was built in a vacuum. Seven years of community-building surround this work - it began in email threads and Reddit messages, outgrew several Discord servers, and converged into [src](https://discord.gg/bp3SuFae5M), where about a hundred people remain active today: researchers, engineers, artists, and collaborators who have followed the work across platforms since 2019.", "Well-networked, in other words. A lot of people are aware of what we do here. I have the best people."]}]}