Ricky is the Systems Architect who founded Repair Forge IT: 14+ years hands-on, 3 in production systems. Based in Houston, serving Texas including Austin.
Repair Forge IT is an IT infrastructure, automation, and practical AI consultancy led by its founder Ricky, a Systems Architect with 14+ years of hands-on experience. Trusted contractors are brought in when a job needs more hands, and automation carries the repetitive load. Clients get a direct line to the person doing the work, with no ticket queue, and a typical reply in under a day. We work on-site across the Houston, TX metro and remotely statewide, including Austin. We scope work to what you need and do not upsell.
Core focus
Infrastructure design and operational support
Automation and system integration
Cloud architecture and environment planning
Monitoring, backups, and recovery readiness
Technical assessment and implementation guidance
What I am running right now
200K+ API requests a month across the systems I keep running
14+ years of taking systems apart to see how they work
0 vendors to chase when something breaks, just one number to call
Capabilities
Infrastructure & virtualization: Enterprise Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL), VMware and KVM hypervisors, Docker and Podman containers, Ansible automation, and zero-trust access via tunnels and Meshnet VPNs. Monitoring, alerting, backups, and disaster recovery go into the design from the start, before a first outage forces the issue.
Networking & security: VLAN segmentation, VPN and remote access, firewall hardening, intrusion detection, honeypots, and network audits. Also role-based access control, database row-level security, multi-factor auth, AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, HMAC-signed webhooks, and dependency scanning on every release.
Development: Full-stack apps in TypeScript and Python, with React and Vite front ends on Express, Flask, or Rust and Axum services. C and C++17 for systems work, and clean REST and gRPC API design. WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility is treated as a requirement from the first build.
Data & storage: PostgreSQL, Supabase, Redis, SQLite, and Snowflake with row-level security and AES field encryption, a columnar OLAP layer for analytics, versioned schemas and migrations, job queues and realtime sync, and S3-compatible object storage.
Testing & verification: Automated suites across the API and the interface, including the authorization cases people skip: whether one customer can read another's record, or whether a hidden field can be set by hand. Load testing finds the ceiling before your customers do, and C and C++ work gets fuzzed under sanitizers. I want to be the one who finds these problems.
Machine learning & practical AI: TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch for production models that get trained, served, and retrained on real outcomes. LLM integration through hosted APIs or local models that keep your data off third-party servers, and tool servers that give AI agents scoped, read-only access behind enforced guardrails.
Software I build
Full-stack business platforms: Internal systems of record that cover a whole client lifecycle: intake, payments, documents and e-signature, scheduling, and a role-aware customer portal. They run as React front ends on Express or Flask back ends, over a versioned PostgreSQL schema.
Money logic, done carefully: The part that has to be right: payments allocated across balances in the correct order, overpayments spilling where they should, two people editing the same record safely, and refunds that roll back completely, with nothing left half-applied. The aim is to end manual month-end reconciliation outright.
Open-source security & developer tooling: Reusable libraries, proxies, and build plugins: a Supabase key-masking proxy, a React Server Components exploit shield, a network canary for Linux hosts, and a dependency-free HTTP and webhook engine in C++17 hardened against request smuggling and resource exhaustion.
Automation & realtime systems: Job queues, signed webhooks, one consolidated live-update layer in place of a dozen ad-hoc ones, and sandboxed document processing that reads spreadsheets, PDFs, and raw email with no access to the host filesystem or your credentials.