This is the work experience which has been retired from my active résumé (or has not been added yet for one reason or another).
Northwood Labs — Colorado
Northwood Labs is an incubator for security and reliability tooling.
It is a tiny company based in Colorado who thinks that software engineering, site reliability, operations, and cybersecurity are all parts of the same whole. We want to empower teams to build quality software and reliable services, teach where there are knowledge gaps, and make it possible for every user to have access to the best in security.
Historically, most of the tools built to address these areas have done a poor job of integrating across all relevant disciplines, and can also cost a small fortune in order to help teams ensure their products and services are well-built, reliable, and secure.
Worked with author E.M. Baird on the book Federal Probation Bible (ISBN: 978-0-578-99269-3). Spent hundreds of hours over the course of a year performing multiple, deep-level revisions and rewrites of content, grammar, and voice.
- Performed all of the production work for the book.
- Typesetting, typography, creation of all graphs and images used in the book.
- Integrated changes from several reviewers.
- Worked with printer candidates on formatting of the print-ready file.
- Adapted cover art designed for screen for print production using Adobe Illustrator.
- Proofed a physical copy of the book, and provided approval to the printer.
Skills: Custom Software, Resolving Issues, Leadership, Software Projects, Functionality, Communication, Typography, Desktop Publishing, Affinity Publisher.
Developed the entire website for “The First-Time Offender’s Guide to Freedom,” managing all technical aspects from inception to deployment. Also performed all production work on the eBook authored by E. M. Baird.
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Utilized then-modern front-end technologies — including Bootstrap, LESS, JavaScript, Gulp.js, npm, and Bower — to build the website's front end. Developed the back end using PHP 5.6 with HHVM and Nginx, integrating MySQL, Redis, Slim Framework, Monolog, Pimple, Twig, Guzzle, Doctrine, Phinx, and Symfony components. Deployed the application using Ansible and developed within a Vagrant environment running Ubuntu.
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Conducted unit, integration, and functional testing using PHPUnit, Behat, Mink, and Selenium. Leveraged Amazon SES for email delivery, Amazon S3 for static file storage, Stripe for payment processing, Linode for web hosting, and MaxMind for IP-based geolocation. Integrated Google Books and Dropbox to ensure customers always had access to the latest errata fixes.
Skills: Custom Software, Software Projects, Functionality, Communication, Desktop Publishing, ePub, Kindle format.
- Developed CloudFusion, a fast and powerful PHP toolkit for rapidly building cloud-based web applications.
- Prioritized design decisions that enhanced performance, ease of use, and overall usability.
- Aimed to provide a high-performance developer toolkit for leveraging Amazon's cloud infrastructure, fostering community growth, and building useful, user-centric applications based on the toolkit.
- Amazon Web Services hired me and hard-forked this project in 2010. It became the AWS SDK for PHP.
Rearden Commerce (now Deem) — Foster City, CA
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Supported the User Experience team, Java developers, and widget development teams by prototyping new features and integrating them into existing systems.
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Migrated JavaScript code from older frameworks to the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), enhancing codebase maintainability.
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Educated teams on the value of high-quality front-end code, placing a strong emphasis on writing code with better performance, faster load times, and improved accessibility across all projects.
WarpShare — Morgan Hill, CA (defunct)
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WarpShare worked to bridge the gap between digital piracy and the economic models of RIAA and MPAA industry groups.
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Aimed to support musical artists and copyright holders by exploring innovative ways to derive value from piracy.
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Recognized that piracy could not be entirely eliminated and analyzed the shortcomings of traditional anti-piracy efforts by the MPAA and RIAA.
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Developed CleerPeer, an efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, which improved upon the performance and efficiency of existing protocols like BitTorrent. Addressed and solved multiple performance and efficiency issues present in the original BitTorrent protocol. (U.S. Patent filing US8103870B2 “Hive-based Peer-to-Peer Network”.)
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Contributed to early concepts in peer-to-peer (P2P) digital content delivery with CleerPeer (c. 2007). These ideas have since been realized in technologies like IPFS, which empowers P2P-based distribution of digital content.
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Researched machine learning-powered content identification methods (c. 2007), which have since been successfully adopted by companies such as YouTube.
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Designed a social network focused around digital media, incorporating gamification elements to enhance tagging and content improvement over automated data sources. Recognized that users enjoy keeping track of music, movies, and TV shows, discovering similar content, and sharing with friends. Drew inspiration from platforms like GetGlue (acquired by Yahoo), Letterboxd, IMDb, Trakt.tv, and Plex to create an engaging and interactive user experience.
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Pioneered an innovative business model (c. 2008) enabling users and brands to support and sponsor content through interactive advertising integrated into the media experience (e.g., content-targeted advertising, a smarter version of sponsorships).
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Designed ads to be part of the content, avoiding interruptions common with pre-roll and mid-roll ads used by platforms like YouTube at the time. (Apple pursued similar advertising concepts with their iAd service (2010), aiming to transform advertising into an experiential medium.)
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Brands sponsored downloads by paying 99¢ per song, held in escrow for the benefit of copyright owners (or donated to charity) in exchange for social engagement, offering an ethical approach to digital content monetization via “piracy”. (For end-users, it is similar to sponsorships of today.)
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Readability (c. 2009) implemented a similar business model for written content (e.g., blogs), but kept any unclaimed funds. Public backlash led to them shutting down in 2016.
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We didn't foresee the shift from piracy to streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, and Netflix.
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Failed because: team was too small; team lacked the required expertise in advertising; team lacked the required expertise in machine learning; funding dried up as the US entered the credit crisis from 2007–2009; tried to do too much up-front; early mistakes spending money on starting a company instead of developing a consumer product.
SimplePie — Open-Source Project
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Ryan is the creator, evangelist, and co-developer of the SimplePie project — a PHP library that enables web developers to simply and easily integrate news feeds into their websites and web applications.
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After recruiting additional development resources in June 2005, Ryan began to shift from a primarily development-focused role to a primarily people-focused role, where he currently works to ensure that people are aware of, and can easily use SimplePie through support, documentation, tutorials, plugins, and evangelism.
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SimplePie was integrated into WordPress, Drupal, MODx, and several other large projects written in PHP. If you've ever used WordPress since 2006, you've used SimplePie with or without knowing it.
Yahoo! — Sunnyvale, CA
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Lead the front-end development of the Spring 2008 re-launch of the Yahoo! Messenger website. He collaborated with a core team of developers to provide increased usability, accessibility, organic search engine optimization (SEO), and simplified maintenance, resulting in exceptionally tuned performance for 29 locales.
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Involved in tuning the front-end stack for performance, where they employed semantically valid HTML/CSS, caching, gzipping, image spriting, code minification, and reduced HTTP requests, resulting in exceptional performance.
Stryker — San Jose, CA
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Core member of the team tasked with re-building the company intranet site around Oracle Portal. His time was spent writing and discussing functional and technical documentation, conducting usability interviews, and creating a fresh UI that employed user-centered design principles, web standards, and fancy new AJAX tech.
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Member of the Endora Marketing Team, which was geared towards spreading information about the company's move to Oracle's ERP software. In that capacity, Ryan maintained the Endora website, wrote numerous articles for the monthly newsletter, interviewed project leads, and created fun little ERP-related polls to help drive interest in the project (essentially internal marketing).
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Worked with the eBusiness team to improve maintenance and development for the UI of the GlobalSource project. He also re-engineered the Stryker Endoscopy public site to follow modern web standards, and built a PHP-based templating system for the site that significantly sped up development.
Digital Impact (now part of Axciom) — San Mateo, CA
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Coordinated with Campaign Managers on email campaign integration, with responsibility for email content and change requests, and ensuring that the content format was consistent with client requirements. He performed the quality tracking and reporting of campaign integration-related metrics, and consulted and troubleshot on text and HTML templates.
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Maintained HTML code guidelines, provided optimal design and processing, and provided suggestions for strategic and process improvements. He also acted as syndication expert for the internal RSS development team.
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Client experience included Banana Republic, SBC (now AT&T), Hewlett Packard (HP), Sony Style, Lexus, MAC Make-up.