Ron Heft
Principal Engineer at The College Board
Reston, Virginia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRon Heft is a product-focused Principal Engineer with 11+ years building resilient, user-centered federal and commercial systems, currently improving citizen-facing services at The White House and previously shaping digital transformation across CMS and the U.S. Digital Service. He blends hands-on engineering and architecture—spanning AWS/Azure, Terraform, containerization, CI/CD, and observability—with a startup mindset from his time as co-founder and CTO of The Social Station. His work includes leading DevSecOps for pandemic-critical systems (COVID test result pipelines, HealthCare.gov scaling, FHIR data sharing) and practical CDN/WAF implementations to harden high-traffic services. A full-stack polyglot, he has shipped mobile and web features (iOS Realm refactors, React Native apps), search and data platforms (Elasticsearch, Postgres), and tooling for robust delivery pipelines. Colleagues rely on him to translate policy and user needs into secure, scalable architectures that perform under extreme load. He is quietly active in open-source contributions, improving real-world developer tools like Raycast extensions and Audiobookshelf’s iOS client.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Baccalaureate Information Sciences and Technology, Baccalaureate Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State UniversityLouis E. Dieruff High School
Stackoverflow
63reputation
225reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (12)
mobile10
regular-expression10
swift10
javascript10
ios10
realm10
avfoundation10
codable9
data-modeling9
user-interface8
instagram-api6
instagram6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
advplyr/audiobookshelf-app
Jul 2022 - Sep 2022
Mobile application for Audiobookshelf
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:18 reviews, 185 commits, 27 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ron primarily contributed to the iOS mobile application for Audiobookshelf. They focused on refactoring the app's data models, switching to native Realm objects for better data handling, and implementing features such as handling download progress, resuming from background, and improved chapter navigation, and integrating with iOS media functionalities. The commits demonstrate a strong focus on the application's core functionality and user experience within the iOS environment.
mobile-applicationaudiobookshelfaudiobooksandroidios
raycast/extensions
Aug 2023 - Jul 2025
Everything you need to extend Raycast.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 PRs, 14 comments, 1 issue in 2 years
Contributions summary:Ron primarily contributed to the `imessage-2fa` extension, focusing on improving its functionality for extracting 2FA codes from iMessage texts. Their work involved refining regular expressions to accurately identify codes in various formats, including alphanumeric and whitespace variations. They also addressed issues related to phone number filtering and incorporated contributions from other developers, demonstrating an active role in enhancing and maintaining the extension's core logic. The user focused on improvements to the code parsing logic.
raycast
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