R Southard
Engineering Manager at EdSights
Lexington, Kentucky, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolR Southard is an engineering manager and former biologist with 17 years of experience building and scaling web and cloud-native engineering teams. He blends technical depth in Ruby/Rails, DevOps, and ML-driven features with a human-centered leadership style that prioritizes mentorship, sustainable culture, and transparent communication. R has led high-impact integrations and delivery improvements at companies like Xometry and GitLab—driving faster quoting, release automation, and pricing/packaging changes that materially increased revenue. As a principal consultant he now helps SMBs adopt GitHub, modern cloud architectures, and generative AI features that tie technical work directly to business outcomes. He is an active open-source contributor (notably to rubyforgood’s Human Essentials back end) and retains a scientific curiosity rooted in published bioinformatics research. Based in Lexington, KY, he brings an uncommon cross-disciplinary lens that surfaces practical, data-informed engineering decisions.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Biological Sciences, BS, Biological Sciences at University of Kentucky
Stackoverflow
1,461reputation
214kreached
2answers
1question
rubygems
top-5%
ssl
top-5%
ruby
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (19)
database-migrations10
ruby-rails10
rspec10
rails10
ruby10
database-migration10
ruby-on-rails10
rubygems9
ssl9
apidoc9
api9
enums8
paperclip6
bundler6
amazon-s36
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
rubyforgood/human-essentials
Nov 2018 - Jun 2019
Human Essentials is an inventory management system for diaper, incontinence, and period-supply banks. It supports them in distributing to partners, tracking inventory, and reporting stats and analytics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:27 commits, 10 PRs, 11 pushes in 7 months
Contributions summary:R primarily contributed to the back-end aspects of the project, focusing on code related to partners and the partner approval process. Their work involved adding functionality to link to documents, refactoring and extracting code to a job, and adding tests. They also refactored the code to use an enum for partner status. Additionally, the user made changes to routes and updated button text.
inventory-management-systemrailsnon-profitrubyforgoodsdg-3
chaserx/streakerbar
Mar 2015 - May 2015
Contributions:2 releases, 42 commits, 14 PRs in 1 month
streakkeepmenubar
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