Ryan Carroll
Lead Engineer Form Health
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Ryan Carroll is a lead engineer at Form Health, with ten years of APIs and web systems behind him across insurance and healthcare. He has spoken at CodeMash and Stir Trek, and has appeared on engineering podcasts talking about how AI is changing the work. He also ships his own software. Mobile, offline-first, and occasionally a machine-learning model he had no business deploying, and those side projects are where he collects the failures worth talking about. He lives in Columbus and is happiest on a trail or in a kayak.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Breaking Mental Barriers: Unleashing Developer Creativity
"I'm not creative, I'm logical." "Someone smarter has already thought of this." "I'm just a software engineer—product ideas aren't my job." Sound familiar? These mental barriers don't just limit your personal projects—they limit your workplace impact, collaboration effectiveness, and career growth potential.
This session reveals how developers unconsciously trap themselves in narrow professional identities and miss innovation opportunities hiding in plain sight. You'll discover why treating your job title as your complete identity creates cognitive boundaries that prevent you from seeing problems as solvable opportunities. Through real examples you'll see how personal problems often reveal universal needs waiting for solutions.
You'll learn systematic approaches for finding ideas in daily life, from keeping friction logs to creating mental space through research-backed techniques like walking meditation. This session provides concrete frameworks for organic brainstorming, structured ideation, and personal filtering systems that help you choose which ideas deserve your time and energy. Most importantly, you'll understand how to move from "someone else will solve this" to "I could solve this"—and why your predictions about what others want are probably wrong.
You'll leave with immediately implementable systems: daily friction capture methods, idea parking lot techniques, and a framework for evaluating which projects to pursue. Beyond personal creativity, you'll discover how breaking your own creative barriers transforms you into a better collaborator—someone teammates trust with ambiguous problems and feel safe sharing half-formed ideas around. This isn't just about building side projects; it's about becoming the kind of developer who spots opportunities, bridges user needs with technical solutions, and helps entire teams think more creatively.
Building and publishing a native, cross-platform mobile app from the ground up
Have a fun app idea but feel overwhelmed by development options? Choosing a framework, initializing the project, and publishing in app stores can be daunting. Luckily, open-source projects like React Native and Expo make the process easier.
In this session, you'll be guided from idea to production using React Native and Expo. We'll start with React Native, showing how it can turn your cross-platform dreams into reality. Then, we'll dive into Expo, demonstrating how it simplifies your workflow with automated builds and easy testing. Finally, we'll cover app store publishing, so you can showcase your work to the world.
If you're a developer of any level, an idea dreamer, or just curious about mobile app development, join us to learn how to bring your app ideas to life.
Bringing ideas to life with DIY IoT: Visualizing Noise Pollution with a Raspberry Pi and Python
Discover how to harness the power of IoT to tackle real-world problems using affordable and accessible technology. In this talk, you'll learn how to build an IoT system from off-the-shelf components, collect data from sensors, and visualize the data to tell compelling stories.
In this talk I'll showcase a project where I used a Raspberry Pi, environmental sensor, and Python to measure and monitor noise levels. This project demonstrates how to design and implement an IoT solution from concept to deployment, including using InfluxDB and Grafana for real-time data visualization, all running in Docker.
By the end of this talk, you'll have the skills to bring various pieces of technology together to solve real-world problems. Whether you're an enthusiast, developer, or researcher, this session will inspire you to apply open-source tools and inexpensive hardware in innovative ways to address the challenges in your every day life.
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