Ryan Elston

Flew to Ohio this week. Met with two industry heavyweights. Same conversation, independently. Both know their DMB CMS isn't keeping up. Stale content. Limited visibility into what's actually running. No real experimentation surface. They've lived with it long enough that it's become background noise. What shifted in the room: neither had been told a different model was possible. When I walked through what DMB software can actually do — 3-day content turns, full observability across the estate, A/B testing on every screen — there was a pause. Not skepticism. Just recalibration. That's the pattern I keep seeing. The demand is there. The bar is just buried under years of low expectations. The businesses are ready. They're just being held back by their stack.

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It took 50 years to go from punch cards to modern IDEs. It took just 3 years to go from basic autocomplete to AI agents that can ship production-ready code. My Checkr colleague Christopher Roth just shared a great deep dive into how we’re moving beyond "autocomplete" to true AI orchestration. The most important takeaway? The engineers of the future won't be defined by their ability to write every line of code, but by their ability to direct the systems that do. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gBTCksDN #AI #Engineering #FutureOfWork #Checkr

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A good creative campaign is always worth celebrating. But every once in a while, you work on something that feels different from the start. Great creative is rare. You know it when you have it. After the success of our 2025 campaign, I had a feeling the chemistry on that team wasn’t just a lucky combination. So when it came time to develop our next campaign, I brought the same core creative team back together to see if we could capture that spark again. And what do you know, lightning does strike twice. This spot is the third film from our anchor set of TV commercials introducing Checkr, Inc.’s AI-powered approach to verifying candidates and fighting hiring fraud. I’m incredibly proud of what this team created together. Campaigns like this are never the work of just a few people, and many talented people helped bring it to life. But a special thank you to Will Miller, Megan Grano, and Julia Martin . Collaborating with the three of you has been one of the highlights of this project. Your talent, trust, and commitment to the work made all the difference. Great work comes from great teams. I’m grateful to have been part of this one.

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I built an open-source alternative to Sentry. Here's why. I've been working on a side project called Moneat (Latin for "to advise" or "to warn") — a lightweight, open-source service monitoring platform. A few things motivated me to build it: Self-hosting Sentry is a nightmare. Anyone who's tried knows this. My 16GB Ubuntu server still hasn't forgiven me. Sentry requires 20+ services running in separate containers. They don't need that many, but if self-hosting is painful enough, you'll pay for their cloud out of convenience. Smart move on their part. Sentry is expensive. I'm not telling paying customers anything new. When I started pricing Moneat, I looked hard to justify their markups so I could bake that into my own pricing. I couldn't find the justification. I have a different vision for how error monitoring should work. If you're going to monitor, alert, and prevent issues, don't rely on a patchwork of other services to finish the job. With Moneat, I built in features I consider critical: alerts for server/container monitoring, health checks, and new or trending errors, all from the same application. That naturally led me to bake in an on-call service as well. This unified approach means the on-call system can provide a single view of where your systems stand, instead of stitching together 7 services and 15 browser tabs to figure out what broke. Licensing Moneat is dual-licensed. 95% of the code is open source under AGPLv3, with an enterprise license for business features like SSO, on-call, and product analytics. If this resonates, I'd really appreciate a star on GitHub or a share within your network. Contributors are welcomed as well :) https://moneat.io https://lnkd.in/eMuPpUKm https://lnkd.in/emztjxaG (iOS version is pending approval)

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Great read from a friend and colleague, Blaine R. at Checkr, Inc.. It’s never about lowering the bar; rather, extending opportunity and an individual answering the challenge. Given the chance, Blaine seized and earned a life that required him to grow personally and professionaly. Give it a read and soak in Blaine’s insights and experiences.

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How are these for results? 👀 200+ experiments a year. 30+ brands. One developer. L’Oréal’s Luxe Division is using Optimizely to power inclusive, data-driven design and scale experimentation like never before — proving that great marketing is equal parts creativity and science. Read the full story here: https://ow.ly/lPF730sQZww

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256 non-engineering Checkrs, 54 submissions, 4 winners — and my team took 2nd place at our AI Hack Day! In less than a day, we built an AI-assisted tool that helps non-subject-matter experts translate a list of drugs into the right testing panel—complete with embedded visual enablement and best-practice guidance. The result: cutting panel selection time from ~30 minutes to under 5, while making outputs more consistent and easier to trust. Big thanks to Checkr, Inc. and Lovable for hosting an awesome session and creating the space to build. Excited to keep shipping.

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I've written the code that security teams audit. Then I became the auditor. I also ship AI products on the side. When a developer skips a review at 11pm because the release is in two hours, I don't write it up. I recognize it. I've made that call on my own products. I know what the pressure feels like and what it makes you rationalize. Security leaders who've never shipped anything don't have that reference point. They flag the risk. They write the policy. They wonder why engineers work around it. I've sat on both sides of that table. The policy I write reflects it. Engineers don't fight guardrails they helped design, and they're more likely to help design them when the person asking has shipped something themselves. Building and securing are not opposite instincts. The best security leaders I've worked with treat them as the same job. Do you think security leaders need an engineering background to be effective? #Security #Leadership #TechLeadership #Engineering

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AI-generated resumes (real thing). Deepfake interviews (even realer!). Credentials fabricated in seconds.(GNARLY!) Hiring has never been more vulnerable or more absurd. So we put together a funny series on what this looks like. Our marketing team cooked with this one 🔥! Four commercials. Each one captures a different moment where trust starts to break down. Checkr, Inc.. 𝘒𝘯��𝘸 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨.

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