Ryan Gardner is a Staff Software Engineer with 15 years of experience building high-performance, large-scale distributed and low-latency systems, currently driving engineering at Upside. He brings deep JVM expertise—everything from Spring Boot services to low-level GC troubleshooting—and a pragmatic approach to APIs, favoring GraphQL and gRPC while using REST where appropriate. Ryan has led framework and architecture efforts, mentored teams, and previously shaped platform infrastructure at Cox Automotive and Dealer.com. An open-source contributor, he improved GC log analysis and added performance benchmarks and DynamoDB support to popular Java libraries, reflecting a focus on observability and runtime performance. Based in Burlington, Vermont, he combines hands-on coding with system-level thinking and a tendency to keep his profile understated, so his public tech list may lag behind his current toolkit.
15 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
BS Applied Physics Computer Science Emphasis, BS Applied Physics Computer Science Emphasis at Brigham Young University
Fork of tagtraum industries' GCViewer. Tagtraum stopped development in 2008, I aim to improve support for Sun's / Oracle's java 1.6+ garbage collector logs (including G1 collector)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:8 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily focused on improving the `gcviewer` project's ability to parse and analyze Java Garbage Collection (GC) logs. They added support for handling decimal values in G1 GC logs, as well as logs using the PrintAdaptiveSizePolicy flag. Furthermore, the user added preliminary support for parsing PrintGCCause strings and logs with the GC Remark phase, enhancing the tool's ability to interpret various GC log formats. These changes demonstrate a focus on expanding the functionality and compatibility of the GC log analysis tool.
Contributions:5 commits, 2 PRs, 5 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the performance testing and benchmarking of the Togglz library. Their work involved creating and integrating JMH microbenchmarks to compare the overhead of Togglz feature flag lookups against simple boolean checks. Furthermore, the user implemented benchmarks centered around feature state options, including those leveraging activation strategies such as the ScriptEngine-based strategy. These efforts provide valuable insights into the library's performance characteristics. The user also added DynamoDB state repository.
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