Gary Ritchie
Principal Software Engineer at Posit PBC
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Summary
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RockstarGary Ritchie is a Principal Software Engineer with over 10 years of recent experience and a multi-decade track record building and shipping desktop and web applications at scale. Based in Edmonton, he designs and implements cross-platform IDE features (RStudio) and has led major ports such as moving RStudio Desktop from Qt/QtWebEngine to Electron, while working across C++, TypeScript, Electron, Java, and Python. Previously at Microsoft and Apple he delivered core Office and macOS features, led teams, and even presented architectural plans to senior leadership, reflecting strong technical and organizational influence. He pairs hands-on engineering—recent contributions include refactoring RStudio internals and adding GUI and accessibility improvements—with advocacy for WCAG accessibility and VPAT authoring. His work spans technical writing and tooling too, contributing documentation for Microsoft Office test tools and practical integrations like cloud storage support on iOS. Pragmatic, cross-platform, and accessibility-minded, he combines deep systems experience with a penchant for modernizing legacy codebases.
10 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
96reputation
33kreached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (17)
r10
documentation10
api-design9
restful-api9
api-rest9
refactor9
front-end-development9
rest-api9
refactoring9
ios8
oauth7
macos6
pointer6
typedef6
qtwebengine6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
rstudio/rstudio
Oct 2016 - Jan 2023
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1000 reviews, 4334 commits, 2592 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Gary's commits focus on refactoring and improving the code, specifically within the RStudio IDE codebase. They made changes to menu callback functionality, improving the support of raw html blocks and code for the projects' mru files. The commits also included changes to the GUI and refactoring related to windows.
integratedrstudiointegrated-development-environmentidedevelopment-environment
microsoft/Office-Online-Test-Tools-and-Documentation
Mar 2016 - Apr 2016
Office Online test tools and documentation
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:10 commits, 9 PRs, 3 comments in 27 days
Contributions summary:Gary primarily contributed to the documentation of the `microsoft/office-online-test-tools-and-documentation` repository. Their work involved creating and updating documentation pages, including the table of contents, onboarding information, and glossary entries, specifically for the iOS native WOPI integration. They also corrected formatting and made style improvements, such as sentence casing for headings.
office-onlinetestingtest-tools
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