Richard Alam
Co-Founder at Blindside Networks
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inEnterprise Web Solutions Development
Richard Alam is a seasoned software engineer and co-founder with 17 years building and sustaining BigBlueButton, a widely used open-source web conferencing system. He blends deep backend and distributed systems expertise—honed at Nortel and multiple senior engineering roles—with hands-on product development and company-building through Blindside Networks. His contributions to BigBlueButton include core audio, screen-share, session control, and presentation recording improvements that materially improved reliability and usability for real-time collaboration. Based in Ottawa, he couples an electrical engineering background and an M.Eng. in Technology Innovation Management to bridge hardware-level thinking with product and operational needs. Known for pragmatic problem-solving, he focuses on fault-tolerant, metrics-driven systems that scale in production.
17 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
M. Eng., Technology Innovation Management, M. Eng., Technology Innovation Management at Carleton University
Github Skills (9)
audio-streaming10
backend10
scala10
webrtc9
redis9
communication-protocol7
protocols7
java5
javas5
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton
Sep 2008 - Sep 2022
Complete open source web conferencing system.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 7123 commits, 1704 PRs in 14 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Richard's contributions focus on enhancing the back-end functionality of the BigBlueButton project. They have made changes to the core modules responsible for handling voice and presentation data by adding functionalities to control audio and screen share functionalities, including, the management of session and control messages. These changes indicate work that improves the system's core features and user experience. Further modifications reflect improvements on core functionality, such as ensuring proper audio recording and adding data metrics to presentation recordings.
kurentobigbluebuttonjavascriptcollaborationvideo-conferencing
ritzalam/bigbluebutton
Apr 2015 - Jun 2021
BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for distance education
Contributions:27 PRs, 1152 pushes, 703 branches in 6 years 2 months
bigbluebuttonjavascriptdistanceconferencingweb-conferencing
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