Robert Wahler is an experienced engineer-turned-entrepreneur with over 17 years building turnkey software and game products from concept through launch as founder of GearheadForHire, Salty Dog Digital, and Wahler Digital. A Georgia Tech mechanical engineer and Navy nuclear veteran, he combines rigorous systems thinking and field-hardened troubleshooting with software craftsmanship across backend, mobile, and game development. His freelance open-source contributions span QA and platform integration—improving test automation in the popular Aruba project and adding locale support to the Moai SDK—reflecting a practical focus on reliability and cross-platform compatibility. Robert’s clients have ranged from energy cooperatives to financial and media firms, demonstrating an ability to translate complex domain requirements into production-ready tools. He still writes handcrafted puzzle and adventure games in his spare time, recently releasing fourtex zen, showing a creative side that informs his technical work. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem solver who enjoys taking projects end-to-end while keeping an eye on long-term maintainability.
17 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Mechanical Engineering, Graduated with Honors, 1989, Bachelor of Science (BS), Mechanical Engineering, Graduated with Honors, 1989 at Georgia Tech
Annotate Rails classes with schema and routes info
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:8 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Robert primarily contributed to the `annotate_models` project, which aims to annotate Rails classes with schema and routes information. Their work involved refining the annotation process, addressing issues related to displaying column limits for integer and boolean types, and resolving merging conflicts. The user also focused on improvements to the annotation tasks and route annotations, and addressing whitespace formatting.
Test command-line applications with Cucumber-Ruby, RSpec or Minitest.
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Contributions:11 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Robert focused on enhancing the testing capabilities of the `aruba` project, a tool for testing command-line applications. Their contributions included adding new test steps like "I should see matching" with regular expression support. They also implemented RSpec configurations and added test coverage for the `@announce_stdout` tag, ensuring the project's functionality is thoroughly validated. These changes improved the reliability and maintainability of the testing framework.
minitesttestingbddrubyrspec
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