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¶
The research foundations behind Paradigm's approach to runtime schema management.
Read the PDF
An Elixir library for dynamic models and metamodels, with transformations and arbitrary levels of abstraction.
HexDocs · Live demo
Nix infrastructure for Phoenix apps: a flake template that pins dependencies, exposes a dev shell, builds a release, and deploys.
GitHub · Write-up
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¶
Why I'm long-term bearish on Docker, Kubernetes, and managed clouds—and how NixOS solves dependencies and deployment from first principles.
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.
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.
Two ways to change a NixOS server, and why building closures locally and pushing them with deploy-rs beats SSH-and-rebuild.
A quick, repeatable way to spin up a NixOS node on DigitalOcean with nixos-infect, ready for declarative deploys.