About me

Hi I'm Ricky. I started Coding w/Ricky to give myself an outlet to share everything I learn as I discover new things through software.

A bit of backstory…

I started programming when I was 15 at Lower Columbia College, where I took my first programming course. I immediately knew I wanted to pursue programming as a career. 2 years later I graduated High School and College at the same time with an associates in Computer Science.

After this I transferred to Washington State University (WSU) where I worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant on a Bonniville Power Administratino (BPA) grant to develop machine learning methods of detecting power-line fauts. I worked alongwide 3 other graduate students and 2 professors to analyze powergrid data, develop detection algorithms, and simulate algorithm effectiveness using the data. I co-authored 2 publications and assisted graduate students in researching their thesis.

During the summer between classes, I worked at nLIGHT, a laser manufacturing company, for a summer internship as a firmware engineer. At nLIGHT I developed features for an interlock box that detects failures of industrial lasers and shuts down the lasers if anything weird happens. This interlock box was used in ensuring safety while manufacturing the lasers. I improved and debugged the interlock box and released updates to manufacturing engineers. Through this project I learned a lot about communcication between hardware, firmware, and software as I was responsible for the entirety of the project.

Now I work for Intel as a software engineer, developing tools to enable my team to validate and debug High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. At Intel I matured as a software developer through discipline of designing archicecture to specifications, maintaining and incrementally improving software, documenting features, using continuous-integration, collaborating with others, mentoring others, and supporting power-on of HPC clusters.

One project at Intel I work on is open-source, called MTT, or Middlware Testing Tool. More info about this project can be found here: https://open-mpi.github.io/mtt

Now I will be studying for a master's degree online at Georgia Tech while I work full-time at Intel. My goal is to become more experienced as a software developer and more knowledgable of growing computer science fields so that I can make an impact and improve the life of others. At Georgia Tech I will learn how to harness the power of AI towards this goal.

If you want to follow my blog, then follow me on twitter at @codingwithricky where I post updates of what I'm doing, including any new blog posts I publish.

If you want to contact me, send me a message on Linkedin: Richard Barella @ Linkedin