Ryan Malloy

In 2002, a trainer named Bill Sprunk handed me a business card with a physical hole where the dot in his URL should have been—he'd punched it out. Twenty-five years later, I remembered it as a star.

That's what great details do: they grow larger than life. The actual hole was a circle, but my memory made it a star. Combine that with "the rockstar of demos" and Demostar was born.

25,000+ lines of code. 2,111+ interactive demos delivered. Zero failures. Trusted by enterprise teams at Zscaler and beyond.

TigerStyle is a collection of essential WordPress plugins that transforms the WordPress development experience from painful to productive.

WordPress out of the box is... a lot. Between the bloated admin, missing developer tools, and endless plugin conflicts, it's easy to understand why developers avoid it. TigerStyle is the answer—a carefully curated set of plugins that strip away the cruft and add what's actually needed.

The collection includes admin enhancements, developer tools, performance optimizations, and security hardening—all tested to work together without conflicts. It's WordPress the way it should have shipped.

2008. I left my position at Keynetics with a two-year non-compete. While working on the DirecTemp project, I remembered something from my youth: using a Walkman tape head and some creative software to read magnetic stripe data. The idea stuck with me.

The lawyers at Givens Pursley LLC (hi Bill!) said I had to wait. When Square announced their iPhone dongle in 2009, I saw the gap: their solution only worked with iPhones—6% of the market. I pivoted to Bluetooth. No smartphone required.

The answer was a keychain-sized Bluetooth credit card reader. Custom PCB design, Bluetooth 4.0 chipset, lithium-polymer battery. Just pair, swipe, and the device auto-dialed PayThatWay to complete the transaction.

75% market coverage—219 million devices—when competitors were stuck at 6%. Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) meant merchants got card-present rates on mobile transactions. First tokens manufactured in Idaho, September 2010.

Electric racing at 200+ mph. Split-second decisions. Data that can't wait.

Dragon Racing (now DS Penske) needed real-time telemetry that could keep up with the DS E-TENSE FE19 cars. Battery status, motor performance, tire conditions—all streaming live to the pit crew, processed and visualized before the car completes a lap.

When milliseconds matter, you build different. The system we created delivered race-critical data with the reliability that professional motorsport demands.

Temperature monitoring for medical and industrial applications. The problem wasn't measuring temperature—it was getting the data from sensor to cloud simply and reliably.

The elegant solution: the iPhone headset jack. Every phone already had one. No Bluetooth pairing, no WiFi configuration, no custom hardware. Plug in the sensor, launch the app, done.

Sometimes innovation isn't about adding complexity. It's about recognizing that the infrastructure you need is already in everyone's pocket.

Netflix for network labs. Weekly multi-million dollar deal presentations, large training classes, and custom labs—all needed complex network environments provisioned on demand, without waiting for IT or fighting over shared resources.

The platform transformed manual lab setup from hours to minutes. Engineers could browse, provision, and access complete network environments through real-time WebSocket consoles. Behind the scenes: VMware vSphere automation, intelligent scheduling with PostgreSQL range queries, and Redis Sentinel for high availability.

All handcrafted lines of Python, 1,791 commits over 5 years. Eliminated configuration errors and dramatically improved hardware utilization.

2016. Two years before PWA standards existed. Universal Technical Institute needed their field representatives to deliver flawless presentations in high school gyms with terrible WiFi—or no WiFi at all.

Working with Mind Over Eye (part of MotorTrend) as the creative firm, we built offline-first before it had a name. A custom 499-line service worker with multi-tier caching. Local event queuing that synced when connectivity returned. Multi-database architecture (PostgreSQL, CouchDB, LocalForage) with conflict resolution for presenter customizations.

99.9% presentation success rate in offline environments. 100+ field representatives across the country. A solution that solved a problem the industry wouldn't address for two more years.

2005. Full-stack before "full-stack" was a term. The largest digital payment platform of its era. Millions in daily credit card transactions. 15,000+ merchants across 200+ countries. And fraud everywhere.

I built the payment processing system including the fraud detection engine: 250+ dynamic rules, sub-50ms response times, real-time risk scoring. Managed the call center. Conducted research on emerging fraud patterns. Pattern recognition that caught what rule-based systems missed.

0.8% chargeback rate—when industry average was 2-3%. 99.9% uptime across 8 years. 50,000+ transactions daily at peak, 150 per second capacity. This is where I learned that scale and security aren't opposites.

2010–2018. Eight years modernizing telecommunications infrastructure for Idaho's largest health insurer. Hundreds of agents across 20+ locations. When members call about their healthcare, the phone system can't fail.

Started with legacy IVR deployment (Convergys/Intervoice), then architected and deployed Cisco UCCE—the enterprise-grade contact center platform. Custom CVP development replaced the aging IVR with modern, maintainable call flows. Real integration, not band-aids.

The scope kept expanding: VMware infrastructure, Captiva OCR for document processing, RightFax for secure faxing (healthcare still runs on fax), phone-based payment processing. Each project built on the last.

Video phones in 2016. Four years before COVID made video calling mandatory, we deployed video endpoints for member services. Sometimes you're just early.

Sometimes the 💩 work is the most important work.

Idaho's septic permit data was scattered across seven health districts—each with different systems, different formats, different accessibility. Homeowners buying property couldn't easily verify septic history. Installers couldn't find regulations. Real estate agents were flying blind.

permits.septic.report aggregates permit records from all seven districts into one searchable database. Map-based visualization, contractor directories, CSV exports. The knowledgebase indexes 97 documents, the 350-page DEQ Technical Guidance Manual, and 85 diagrams—all full-text searchable across 44 counties.

Built in collaboration with Qube Septic, a long-time client serving the Treasure Valley since 2010. When you work with the same client for years, you learn their industry inside and out.

Home inspectors spend hours writing reports after leaving a property. What if the report was 90% done before they left the site?

inspect.systems analyzes photos as you take them—identifying outlets, breaker panels, water heaters, defects. Voice-to-text captures notes. Thermal imaging spots moisture and heat loss. The automation works silently while you inspect.

Results: 75% reduction in report writing time. Inspectors scaling from 18 to 55+ inspections monthly. ROI in 2-3 weeks.

The free PWA version, inspect.pics, brings core inspection management to anyone with a browser—no app store required.

The web took 30 years to get security mostly right. MCP gives us the chance to do it right from the start.

The Model Context Protocol solves what I call the N×M problem: instead of building point-to-point integrations between every AI and every tool, you build once to a standard. Self-describing servers that announce their capabilities. The protocol reached 5,000+ servers in eight months—what HTTP took three decades to achieve.

Our collection includes 15+ production MCP servers: PDF processing with intelligent method selection, VMware management, video production tools, PyPI analysis with 37 tools across 8 categories, browser automation via Playwright, MQTT integration, Arduino CLI with circuit diagrams, and more.

16 packages on PyPI—not just internal tools, but open-source contributions anyone can install. From mcpypi for package intelligence to mcplaywright for browser automation to mcp-pdf for document processing.

Contributor to FastMCP itself (21K+ stars)—the core framework for building MCP servers. When you use the ecosystem daily, you find ways to make it better.

This is the "Universal Bridge Architecture"—standardized primitives that let AI systems communicate with anything from databases to hardware to APIs.

255 public repositories. Not just my own projects—contributions back to the tools I use every day.

Major contributions: django-oscar (6.5K stars), shynet (3.1K stars), netbox-docker (2.4K stars), Part-DB (1.4K stars), devicetype-library (1.3K stars), procrastinate (1.2K stars).

Active work: Inkscape—implementing SVG 2.0 feDropShadow filter primitive (Issue #5939). sqlite-rembed—9,600+ lines adding genai integration, batch processing, and multimodal support to SQLite embeddings. rust-genai (601 stars)—multi-provider generative AI client.

The Django ecosystem, NetBox infrastructure, Jazzband community projects. When you use open source daily for decades, giving back isn't optional—it's how the ecosystem survives.

A plumber needs excavation equipment. An electrician needs concrete cutting. A homeowner needs someone who actually shows up. Currently, everyone spends hours cold-calling, waiting for callbacks, or getting their project sold to ten different bidders.

SideJob is a two-sided marketplace. Homeowners and property managers use sidejob.pro to find pre-vetted contractors with verified Idaho state licenses. Licensed contractors use crew.sidejob.pro to network, find subcontractors, and pick up side jobs from each other.

This isn't a lead generation service—your project goes to a curated network, not sold to the highest bidder ten times over. And it's not a nationwide corporate platform with franchises and call centers. Real local contractors, verified before they can join.

The payment philosophy is "NOOB"—None Of Our Business. Financial transactions happen directly between parties. We work on handshakes here; word is bond. The platform facilitates introductions, not transactions.

Built on dignity.ink principles: your professional data belongs to you, not us. We don't sell your information, don't surveil your activity for profit, and don't extract value from jobsite workers. Free forever.

"Modern kitchen with mountain views." That's how buyers actually think about properties. Not "3 beds, 2 baths, 1,500-2,000 sq ft, $400K-$500K."

HomeStar is a white-label real estate platform for brokerages that lets buyers search the way they naturally describe what they want. The semantic search converts natural language into property matches. The photo analysis identifies features like "granite countertops" and "hardwood floors" directly from listing images—making them searchable even when they're not in the description.

Each brokerage gets their own branded site with their domain, their colors, their logo. MLSGrid, RESO Web API, and legacy RETS feeds sync automatically. Lead routing distributes inquiries to agents based on expertise and configurable rules. Analytics track what buyers are searching for in real-time.

The testimonials tell the story: "340% more leads." "Buyers stopped bouncing to other sites because they could finally describe what they actually wanted." One broker found listings with gas ranges—not from the description, but from the photos.

500K+ properties indexed. 50+ MLS integrations. 99.9% uptime SLA. Launch a fully branded property search site in days, not months.

Registered Christmas Eve 2005. A personal site that refuses to be boring.

The homepage boots like an old Packard Bell—complete with ANSI terminal output, TLS certificate validation theater, and a simulated "finger" command showing the .plan file. Navigation happens through a Video Toaster 4000 control panel, because if you're going to build a personal site, you might as well make it memorable.

Underneath the nostalgia is a serious content architecture: 16 content collections covering everything from BBS culture and ANSI art galleries to protocol deep-dives and AI collaboration stories. The site functions as a PWA with sophisticated service worker caching—the "COLD BOOT" vs "WARM BOOT" diagnostics aren't just for show.

The heroes section profiles influences from DJB (whose tools powered the original email and DNS) to Margaret Hamilton (whose error handling philosophy shapes how I write code). The collaborations section documents AI partnership experiments. The textfiles collection preserves underground computing history.

Twenty years of accumulated digital archaeology, wrapped in a loving tribute to the era when personal sites had personality.

Before GitHub, before Stack Overflow, before the web itself—there was the BBS.

A 286 with a Hercules monitor. 2400 baud modems that screamed and hissed. ANSI art, door games, and FidoNet echoes. This was computing before the Internet made it mainstream, when every connection felt like an adventure and every new board was a discovery.

These archives capture that era: the underground textfile scene, the pioneers who shaped how we think about security and systems, and the moments that sparked a 40-year obsession with building what doesn't exist yet.