I’m Sam Ritchie. I’m Co-Founder and CTO at Perceptual, living in Boulder, Colorado. Before Perceptual I was a research engineering lead at CHI-FRO, working on tooling and interactive experiences for rational AI and probabilistic programming. Before that I worked at Google X, Stripe, and Twitter.
I co-founded PaddleGuru and RaceHub, and have written a number of prominent open source projects in Scala and Clojure, including Emmy, a computer algebra system for computational mathematics and physics.
I run ultramarathons and I’m currently flight-testing N720AK, an RV-10 airplane I built. I write about math, physics, programming, and trail running at this site. My newsletter Road to Reality covers the mathematics of physics. Sponsor my work on GitHub.
A Short History
I left the US Sprint Kayaking Team in 2009 and moved to New York, where I got a job at the TED Conference and spent my evenings teaching myself Objective-C. I developed a series of iOS games for ThinkFun, a puzzle company founded by my parents – Rush Hour, Solitaire Chess, and Chocolate Fix. Rush Hour was the most commercially successful.
In 2010 I moved to Philadelphia to code full time. Dan Hammer and Robin Kraft invited me to collaborate on FORMA (FORest Monitoring for Action), a system that produces free forest clearing alert data at 500m resolution from MODIS satellite imagery every 16 days. I rewrote their Python prototype in Clojure using Cascalog, a Clojure data processing library for Hadoop, and eventually became Cascalog’s maintainer.
My Cascalog work led to an interview at BackType in 2011, which was acquired by Twitter shortly after. I deferred the offer to go race the Texas Water Safari (a 260-mile canoe race that my partner and I won), then joined Twitter’s Analytics and Infrastructure group. At Twitter I created Summingbird, a library for writing MapReduce programs that run in batch (via Scalding) or realtime (via Storm), and contributed to Algebird, Bijection, Chill, Storehaus, and Tormenta.
I left Twitter in November 2013, co-founded PaddleGuru and moved to Boulder, Colorado. I worked at Stripe on machine learning infrastructure, then at Google X on a research lab called Blueshift, before joining CHI-FRO to build tooling for probabilistic programming and rational AI. I’m now Co-Founder and CTO at Perceptual.