Richard Ryan received his B.S. in Mathematics from Colorado State University (1985) and B.S. in Computer Science from Colorado State University in 1993. His area of interest includes software development, configuration, and maintenance in the Unix environment, particularly with software used for the processing of scientific data. From 1993 to 1997, he worked at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Fort Collins Colorado. His work there included the development of a character terminal user interface to an Informix SQL database in AT&T’s Unix System V environment. This allowed the user to interact through the terminal to the database using SQL embedded in software in the C programming language. The database interaction also included report extraction and generation using scripts he had written in Perl using embedded SQL through the isqlperl API. He also worked on software configuration, building, and installation using imake and Bourne shell scripting. Other work at Hewlett Packard in Fort Collins and Loveland from 1997 through 1999 included regression testing of software for running various hardware tools, included regression testing of software for Y2K compliance. Other work there included development of Bourne and Korn shell scripting and object oriented Perl scripting used for logging user actions on a system. Later work for other companies in Boulder and Fort Collins included C programming regression tests of locally written C libraries, extraction of information from C++ source code to be put into XML sources for the purposes of documentation of the code internals, and maintenance and upgrade of C source software for point-of-sale systems on the DOS platform. Work for CIRA at NOAA in Boulder has included support of the mass store system, various software support tasks in C, C++, Perl and Ruby, support for MADIS data retrieval and storage, high level BUFR data extraction, etc.