About

I'm Ryan McKenna — a software designer, advocate, and maker of web things. I'm a Senior Staff Engineer at Sprout Social and a MACH Alliance Ambassador. I chose to learn coding to realize my dreams and aspirations in a medium I grew up on, and I've spent the years since building products that help people live better lives.

Most of my work sits where architecture meets craft: composable and MACH platforms, design systems that stay coherent across dozens of teams, and internal developer portals that make engineering knowledge findable instead of tribal. Before Sprout Social I spent several years at RVO Health, latterly as a Principal Engineer, working on healthcare platforms serving around a hundred million people a month — the kind of scale that punishes clever architecture and rewards boring, well-understood systems.

I speak about that work publicly. I've presented at MACH X in London and Toronto, sat on the design systems panel at MACH Three in Chicago, spoken at Netlify Compose in San Francisco, and joined webinars with Swimm and Spotify on running Backstage as an internal developer portal. I also served as Tech Lead and board member at Created for Crisis, a not-for-profit that used composable technology to stand up a global COVID-19 response platform.

Outside of that I run Dawnsurfer Studios ↗, a small game studio where my side projects now live. If you want to talk about composable architecture, developer experience, speaking, or something you're building, the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.