R. Riley Holmes

I turn complex system problems into working software, fast.

I’m an independent engineer with a safety-critical systems background. I help teams tackle the hard infrastructure problems where data models are tangled, subsystems are evolving, and real-world conditions make reliability difficult.

Areas I Work In

AI Agent Reliability & Orchestration: Safety-critical engineering principles applied to a space that desperately needs them.
Data Integration & Model-Based Architecture: Formal ontology management, schema evolution, and fault-tolerant integration.
Rapid Prototyping & System Delivery: Complex systems, built and deployed quickly. I specialize in going from “we need this” to production without the months of overhead.

Open Source

Paradigm - An Elixir library for dynamic models and metamodels, with transformations and arbitrary levels of abstraction. The core engine behind my approach to runtime schema management and data integration.

HexDocs - Paradigm Pro (live demo)

Fault-Tolerant Empirical Megamodeling - The research foundations behind Paradigm's approach to runtime schema management.

Read the PDF

Recent Blog Posts

Provisioning a NixOS node in DigitalOcean

Here’s an easy way to get a NixOS node spun up using nixos-infect. 1) Set up a new droplet Choose Ubuntu 22.04 Add SSH keys for something you have a local IdentityFile for. Under “Advanced Options” -> “Add initialization scripts” paste #cloud-config write_files: - path: /etc/nixos/host.nix permissions: '0644' content: | {pkgs, ...}: { environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ vim ]; } runcmd: - curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elitak/nixos-infect/master/nixos-infect | PROVIDER=digitalocean NIXOS_IMPORT=./host.nix NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-25.05 bash 2>&1 | tee /tmp/infect.log 2) SSH in and copy config down Add the node’s SSH config to ~/.ssh/config ...

R. Riley Holmes¶

Areas I Work In¶

Open Source¶

Recent Blog Posts

R. Riley Holmes

Areas I Work In

Open Source