I'm Ryan Kerwick — a computer science student at CU Boulder with a deep fascination for the things that happen two layers below the operating system. I'm drawn to problems where the abstraction gets thin: where a stray noise pulse, a misaligned timer interrupt, or a single unchecked pointer can quietly undo an entire system.
I started programming the way anyone does who asks "but how does the computer actually know?" — and never really stopped asking. That curiosity pushed me through C, assembly, and the strange middle-earth of bare-metal firmware. It eventually landed me at Tensentric, where I wrote safety-critical firmware for an underwater blood-pressure monitor in a regulated, ISO 13485 environment. The work carried real consequences — each line of code had to answer to a risk document — and I loved every minute of it.
My current focus is a blend of embedded systems, systems engineering, applied AI, and the quieter corners of cybersecurity. I want to build things that feel elegant in software and tangible in hardware — instruments, tools, and interfaces that do something genuinely real in the physical world.
When I'm not at a keyboard I'm usually in the gym, in the kitchen running an experiment I probably shouldn't, or hunched over a breadboard arguing with a logic analyzer. The discipline of physical training, it turns out, translates cleanly into the patience that firmware debugging demands.
My goal: graduate into a role where I can write firmware or systems software with real-world consequences — ideally for teams that care deeply about correctness, documentation, and durability. Until then, I'm shipping what I can, and keeping the field notes.
