Ryan Vandersmith

Ryan Vandersmith is an R&D software engineer with over 10 years of experience and a deep self-taught background in meteorology. He builds weather forecasting and analysis tools used by photographers, storm chasers, and researchers, including Mesoview (skychaser.mesoview.app), a cloud inversion forecast tool, a mountain wave visualization tool, and a stepwise CAPE/CIN contribution to SounderPy. Professionally, he worked on Caffeine.ai, an AI website builder, and led Motoko programming-language tooling, including a VS Code extension with more than 85,000 installs. He also has experience with cross-chain EVM integrations, developer-experience products, UX research, Rust research software at the University of Colorado Boulder, consulting, and public-sector software.

I co-led the development of a feedback board for the DFINITY / ICP developer community. The product used React, Tailwind, Vite, and Next.js and was used to inform development priorities for the developer experience and platform teams.

Built a full-stack feedback product to support developer experience research and prioritization.

Developer Experience Feedback Board

Worked across product engineering, language tooling, developer experience, and ecosystem research at DFINITY Foundation. Contributed to Caffeine.ai, an AI website builder, and adopted agentic AI tools including Copilot, Cursor, and Antigravity to accelerate engineering work.

- Led Motoko language tooling, including a VS Code extension, formatter, live-reload development server, package manager, embed service, and compiler browser support (Node.js, TypeScript, Docker, WebAssembly).
- Led cross-chain EVM integrations and an observability dashboard using Rust and Grafana.
- Built the Developer Experience Feedback Board with React, Tailwind, Vite, and Next.js.
- Led design of a standard library optimized for LLM code generation, including big data analysis using Langfuse and Databricks.
- Conducted UX surveys and generative and evaluative studies.
- Analyzed Motoko source code on GitHub with Python to inform language design.
- Mentored community developer grant recipients.

The VS Code extension reached more than 85,000 installs.

Led programming-language tooling and cross-chain integrations, contributed to an AI website builder, and led developer experience products.