{"meta": {"version": 1, "updated": "2026-07-22"}, "basics": {"name": "Ryan James Brooks", "label": "Director, Composer, Architect", "tagline": "Nineteen years across enterprise IT, DevOps, security, and machine learning - the last seven 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", "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", "bullets": ["Hardware and software support; installed wireless radios and satellite WAN solutions in rural areas."]}]}, {"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": "The Blind Watchmaker: Harmonic Latent Space 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", "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."]}]}