Dick Fickling
Chief Technology Officer at Groundswell
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDick Fickling is a seasoned engineering leader and CTO with 14 years of experience building scalable consumer fintech and e-commerce products, including high-growth stints at Honey (pre-PayPal acquisition) and as an early architect at Dave.com where he scaled engineering to 70 people and supported millions of users. He co-founded Lovd.com out of YC W21, raising a $3.5M seed, and now advises and consults for early- to mid-stage startups while leading technology at Groundswell. Hands-on across backend and database engineering, Dick has contributed to well-regarded open-source digital forensics projects (The Sleuth Kit and Autopsy), improving hash handling and database performance—an unusual intersection of consumer fintech scale and low-level forensics tooling. He blends product-driven architecture with a founder’s operational instincts, able to move from core systems and data integrity to rapid team growth and fundraising readiness. Based in New York, he pairs Northeastern CS training with a track record of turning complex technical problems into commercially successful products.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Northeastern UniversityConserve School
Chinese, English
Github Skills (13)
javas10
md5sum10
md510
c-language10
incident-response10
cprogramming-language10
computer-forensics10
database-design10
java10
sqlite9
file-management8
filesystem8
xml8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
sleuthkit/autopsy
Jan 2012 - Sep 2012
Autopsy® is a digital forensics platform and graphical interface to The Sleuth Kit® and other digital forensics tools. It can be used by law enforcement, military, and corporate examiners to investigate what happened on a computer. You can even use it to recover photos from your camera's memory card.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:437 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Dick focused on improving the Autopsy framework, with commits including setting or resetting offsets and managing property settings. They also contributed to database management by modifying XML-based case configurations, enabling changes, and updating attributes. Additionally, they worked on integrating new or existing files and data, modifying core functions, and improving ingest services.
memoryenforcementcameraforensicslaw
sleuthkit/sleuthkit
Jan 2012 - Sep 2012
The Sleuth Kit® (TSK) is a library and collection of command line digital forensics tools that allow you to investigate volume and file system data. The library can be incorporated into larger digital forensics tools and the command line tools can be directly used to find evidence.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:127 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Dick contributed significantly to the back-end functionality of the Sleuthkit project by implementing and enhancing hash calculation features. They added functionalities to calculate and store MD5 hashes, which involved modifying the Java bindings and core C++ code. Their work extended to optimizing database interactions, including adding index capabilities and implementing methods to update the known status of files in the database. They also removed hash calculations from add image processes.
sleuthincident-responsentfscommand-line-toolsforensics
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