Hi, I'm Austin Riba.

I've been developing software for almost as long as I've been riding a bike.

My fascination with computers started when I installed Red Hat Linux 8 on my computer in middle school. Soon I was writing Python scripts to "help" with my homework and I've been hooked on programming ever since. I was excited by the possibility of being able to build something and share it with the world. I still get excited about that to this day.

Projects Experience Github Contact

Software Development

Most of my experience has been in web development and Python, in particular backend with Django.

I've been fortunate to work on a variety of teams and industries throughout my career, including but not limited to:

Serious enterprise teams building Serious Enterprise Java Applications
Paranoid teams building cryptographically secure phone apps
Teams full of astrophysics PhDs building a distributed astronomical observatory
Silicon Valley startup teams where we had no idea what we were building
Teams containing professional athletes at a bicycle manufacturer

I may be available for software consultancy. Contact me if you are interested in working together.

Current Interests

With 10+ years of experience with Python and Django, it will always have a place in my ❤️. However, I'm a firm believer in the craft of software engineering in general and remain committed to continuous learning.

Recently I've been exploring the world outside of the browser, doing mostly systems and application development in languages like Rust and Zig.

A few things I've been working on:

  • Gelly - a Jellyfin music client written in GTK and Rust. Currently at 5k+ global installs and growing.
  • Rrredis - a Redis implementation in Rust with a fully async architecture. Full of data structures and patterns I like to reference in other projects.
  • Aeros-V - a small operating system for Risc-V written in Zig. Named after my dog.

Experience
Las Cumbres Observatory Senior Software Engineer March 2025-Present
  • I am back to working on space related projects, they have too much gravity.
SRAM July 2022 - March 2025
  • Making cool bike stuff! 🚲 🚲 🚲
Freelance Developer January 2020 - July 2022
  • A few stealth projects still under development 😉
  • Developed the Forward Lateral lateral inspection software. Took the project from mockups, to a MVP, to full production deployment in less than 5 months. Read more in the Santa Barbara Independent.
  • Helped develop the TreasureMap, a web app designed to help astronomers with electromagnetic followup of gravitational-wave (GW) events.
  • Merged my side project Trail Care with LuvTrails to enhance both platforms and bring more business opportunity to the project.
Las Cumbres Observatory Senior Software Engineer August 2015-January 2020
  • Principal developer of the TOM Toolkit project, an open source framework built on Django for managing Astronomical observing programs.
  • Built the LCO Archive, a data warehouse and pipeline for 60+ TB of data on Amazon with a fully programmatic API.
  • Designed and developed the Valhalla Observation Portal: the main user facing interface for Astronomers into the observatory as well as the network's request database.
  • Mentored and advised junior developers in an array of development projects.
Silent Circle LCC Senior Software Engineer November 2013-April 2015
  • Using a Django/ Python stack built out the business back end for the company’s application suite. Application was designed to handle user subscription, payment and authentication.
  • Designed and built a business management dashboard for the largest clients designed to handle operations on hundreds of thousands of users.
Locus Energy Software Engineer April 2011-October 2011
  • Completed a contract to move the company's infrastructure from traditional hosting to AWS. Required migrating tens of Linux and Windows servers, a VPN and a clustered database on to Amazon's largest instance types available at the time.
CSRware Inc Software Engineer April 2010-November 2013
  • Using Spring and Java developed a SASS application for businesses that tracked their ecological impact by analyzing consumed utility bills and other raw data and computed emissions, waste, heat, etc.

Education

2008-2011 Southern Oregon University, B.S. Computer Science

Pedal Driven?

If you meet me in person, chances are I'll be wearing a pair of bike shoes with my laptop on my back. Not only is cycling one of my biggest hobbies, I believe in the bike's enormous potential to transform our lives through positive impacts on the environment, economics, social interaction, city planning and personal health. I write about it from time to time.