Rylan Polster
Software Engineer at Shopify
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRylan Polster is a software engineer with eight years of experience who combines backend automation, release engineering, and cross-architecture packaging expertise. Based in New York, he is a long-time Homebrew maintainer and former Technical Steering Committee member who has driven architecture-aware refactors, improved build and release processes, and modernized CLI tooling across widely used Homebrew repositories. He brings practical systems experience from both open source and academia—having validated FPGA hardware for low-power brain-computer interface research at Yale—so he’s comfortable working from hardware-adjacent RTL up through Ruby and Bash toolchains. At Shopify and in large OSS projects he focuses on reliability, automation, and developer ergonomics, and his contributions often target subtle interoperability and multi-arch distribution issues that most consumers don’t notice until they break.
8 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Yale University
Stackoverflow
331reputation
6kreached
9answers
5questions
Github Skills (32)
git10
multiplatform10
package-management10
scripting10
command-line-interface10
bash10
homebrew-cask10
cross-platform10
ruby10
homebrew10
automation10
script10
build-automation10
command-line10
sh10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
Homebrew/brew
May 2020 - Jan 2023
🍺 The Package Manager for Everywhere
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:9 releases, 1376 reviews, 871 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Rylan focused on maintaining and improving the build process of Homebrew. They were responsible for refactoring the build process and added automation. The contributions included changes for various shell commands with arguments. The user also worked on integrating a release process for Homebrew.
package-managerhomebrewrubymacosbrew
DomT4/homebrew-autoupdate
Apr 2021 - Dec 2022
:tropical_drink: An easy, convenient way to automatically update Homebrew.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:16 reviews, 19 commits, 14 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Rylan primarily worked on enhancing the `homebrew-autoupdate` tool. Their contributions included converting the tool to a Ruby V2 command, handling subcommands and options, and refining the command-line interface by updating the usage banners. They also addressed style issues in the code, ensuring consistency. These changes improved the usability and functionality of the Homebrew autoupdate feature.
homebrewhomebrew-autoupdateruby
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