R. Riley Holmes

I turn complex system problems into working software, fast.

Currently writing Elixir for satellite ground control systems at True Anomaly.

I’m a software developer 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.

Have a hard problem? Let's talk →

GitHub · LinkedIn

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.

Featured Projects

Fault-Tolerant Empirical Megamodeling

The research foundations behind Paradigm's approach to runtime schema management.

Read the PDF

Paradigm

An Elixir library for dynamic models and metamodels, with transformations and arbitrary levels of abstraction.

HexDocs · Live demo

PhoeNIX

Nix infrastructure for Phoenix apps: a flake template that pins dependencies, exposes a dev shell, builds a release, and deploys.

GitHub · Write-up

Groundhog

A persistent, autonomous LLM assistant built as a thin (~200-line) Nix systemd module that slots into a NixOS server.

GitHub · Write-up

See all projects →

Recent Blog Posts

The Power of Nix: Developing, Building, and Deploying a Phoenix App

The 'holy grail' Nix flake for Phoenix: pinned deps, a dev shell, a build derivation, and deployment—one piece of infrastructure for the whole lifecycle.

Deploying Hugo in NixOS

Framing out and deploying a Hugo site in one painless sitting with Nix and deploy-rs, wired into a NixOS VPS as a flake input.

Setting up deploy-rs for NixOS

Two ways to change a NixOS server, and why building closures locally and pushing them with deploy-rs beats SSH-and-rebuild.

Provisioning a NixOS node in DigitalOcean

A quick, repeatable way to spin up a NixOS node on DigitalOcean with nixos-infect, ready for declarative deploys.

R. Riley Holmes¶

Areas I Work In¶

Featured Projects¶