About
I'm Ryan McCue, a software engineer in Calgary. I've spent over ten years shipping production software, most recently as Director of Engineering at Clever Real Estate. Now I'm back to building full time, doing agentic development at a small startup.
What I write about
Mostly velocity, making coding agents effective, and running them in parallel. I'm interested in what changes when code gets cheap to write: specs, review, proof that something works, and everything else between a prompt and production.
How I got here
I studied Computer Systems Technology at Camosun College in Victoria. My first real job was building the Django backend for an e-commerce platform at Lauder Media. At FreshWorks Studio I became a team lead, and at Foundry Spatial I moved a fleet of geospatial apps from hand-patched VMs onto Kubernetes, which is where I fell for infrastructure.
In 2019 I joined Clever Real Estate as a Staff Engineer and spent five years as tech lead on core systems. Then I moved into management, first as an Engineering Manager and later as Director of Engineering.
Something I've built
Clair Flow is a Mac dictation app that turns speech into clean writing in whatever app you're using.
What I believe
- AI multiplies good engineers; it doesn't replace them.
- Delivery systems beat demos. The real question isn't whether an agent can write the code, but whether you can review it, verify it and ship it safely.
- Shipping is the only metric that forces honesty.