Becca Miller

I studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and my first job out of college was in a hospital research department rather than a software company. I spent two years working in the anesthesiology department at Nationwide Children's Hospital — collaborating with clinicians, running statistical analysis, designing research methodology, and contributing to published work. (Full publication list on ORCID.)

From there I moved into software engineering proper, joining READY Robotics as a software engineer. That's where my thinking about building things really changed -- I'd spent years writing research scripts with defined workflows and controlled conditions, and producing code that worked because the people using it were following a specific protocol. READY was my first encounter with production software. It turns out real users don't follow defined workflows. Instead, they find every edge case you didn't anticipate, and every path you assumed nobody would take. That's where I developed a deep instinct for QA, for predicting how things break, and for building software that holds up when people use it in ways you didn't expect. I also got my first real taste of the full product cycle, including hardware integration, translating wireframes into working features, and learning how to get from "here's what we want" to "here's what we can actually build."

When I left READY, I didn't go looking for another full-time role. I wanted to build my own things and take on consulting work that let me keep doing both. That's still true today — my consulting work and the products I build are expressions of the same instinct. I'm most at home when I'm figuring out what to build and then building it, especially when the problem doesn't have an obvious answer yet. I work primarily in Python, JavaScript, and C#, across backend, desktop, and web application development.

My projects have ranged from building a custom image generation tool for a medical technology client who needed synthetic testing data to scoping and leading development on a desktop application for local AI deployment. I've managed shifting feature lists and made the prioritization calls that shaped final products. The problems look different every time, but the shape of the work is usually the same: start with ambiguity, and end ith something that works.

Alongside consulting, I build my own software under Moonspire Labs. I focus on creating tools that sit at the intersection of technology and creativity, mostly for people who want to engage more deliberately with the things they care about. (See the Products page.) I also co-founded Wildethorn Studios, an indie game studio where I serve as lead developer.