Résumé
Work I've done. Things I've created.
Ryan Parman is a technologist, entrepreneur and open source hacker. He is a software engineer who is fiercely passionate and downright obsessive about user experience. He inherently understands that the customer is the single most valuable asset an organization can have, and is driven by the unrelenting pursuit of customer-driven focus, ideals and user experience.
Are you a recruiter? Please take a moment to read How to make technical professionals not hate your guts: A guide for technical recruiters before contacting me. Thanks.
Technical Skills and Software
Highly Proficient
- Standard front-end engineering toolbox:
- HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, YAML, DOM, JavaScript Events, JSON, performance tuning, jQuery, YUI 2.x, MVC design pattern
- Standard software engineering toolbox:
- OOP fundamentals, metaprogramming, polymorphism, performance, reflection, character encoding manipulation, opcode caching, Git, Subversion, Mac OS X, RHEL, Ubuntu, Fedora, Windows, TextMate,
find,grep,ls,cat,>,>>,|,nanoand more!
- User experience fundamentals:
- WCAG and Section 508 web accessibility guidelines, progressive enhancement principles
- PHP development toolbox:
- PEAR, PECL, PHPUnit, PHPT, Xdebug, PHPDocumentor, Vanity, SimplePie, RequestCore, CacheCore, cURL, SimpleXML, DOMDocument, iconv, mbstring, APC, XCache, code profiling (cachegrind), garbage collector, namespaces, anonymous functions, SPL, magic methods, and more!
- Metadata formats:
- RSS, Media RSS, Atom, various Microformats, RDFa, Dublin Core, FOAF, CommonTag, OpenSearch
- Infrastructure and deployment:
- Amazon Web Services, PHP Fog, Capistrano
- API design:
- RESTful web service API design
Proficient
- Standard software engineering toolbox:
- MacPorts, Homebrew, RubyGems, npm,
yum,apt-get,make,rake,ant,vi
- User experience fundamentals:
- Usability testing, copywriting, visual design, interface design, interaction design, contingency design, information architecture, marketing, community development
- Integrated Development Environments:
- Eclipse PDT, Aptana Studio
- Scalable system design:
- Understanding and designing highly-scalable, distributed systems for running web applications and web services (e.g., cloud computing).
- MVC frameworks:
- Zend Framework's View & Controller classes; Slim micro-framework
- Visual design tools:
- Photoshop, Fireworks, Pixelmator
- Odds-and-ends:
- Organic search engine optimization, Apache httpd configuration, Markdown
Limited Experience Worth Mentioning
- Persona/user research, Rails, MySQL, Sass, Haml, DocBook, Rackspace CloudFiles, Eucalyptus Community Cloud, Google Storage
Personality (or, “What to expect when working with me”)
- I'm friendly and I like to help people.
- I will always question the status quo. “Just because” is never a good enough answer.
- I'm smart, motivated, passionate and ambitious. I'm highly opinionated about good and bad ways of doing things, but those opinions are informed by years of practical experience. Sensitive people call it “having a strong personality” and are rubbed-wrong by it. Others find it inspiring. You can't please everyone all the time.
- I believe that if you're dumb, you should surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, you should surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
- I encourage you to disagree with me. Engaging in a dialog about it will make us both better, and will generally produce a better product for customers.
- I care about the end-user above all else. If anything (e.g., company politics, poor management decisions, the client who writes us the checks) prevents us from delivering the best possible experience for our end-users, my manager should expect to get an earful from me because it means that our priorities are in the wrong order.
- I believe that smarts are good, but hustle is better.
- I'm a fast learner. My technical skills are near-entirely self-taught, and I'm passionate about the latest web standards, innovations, techniques, and technology trends.
- I speak clearly, write clearly, and try to ensure that everybody is on the same page whenever possible. If we're not, let's figure out how we can be.
- I'm good at managing my time and responsibilities, and am most productive in self-managing teams. Micromanagement is a death-knell to productivity. So are meetings.
- I balance my natural tendency toward perfectionism against deadlines and priorities because I understand that shipping is the most valuable feature a product can have.
- Business is not personal and personal is not business. We may end up arguing in meetings all day long, but let's go grab a beer after work and hug it out.
- “If I had a job where I couldn't influence the quality of the product, I'd quit. Life's too short to make crap.” — Amy Hoy
- "Every product is an opportunity to create joy in someone's life. If you're not doing that then you're in it for the wrong reasons." — Robert S. Andersen
Work Experience
Amazon — Seattle, WA
Web Development Engineer II, Amazon Web Services (March 2010 – Present)Ryan is the creator and visionary behind the AWS SDK for PHP — a best-of-breed toolkit for rapidly building cloud-based web applications. As Amazon Web Services' ambassador to the PHP community, Ryan invests heavily in supporting the needs of developers by taking the time to listen and understand.
Ryan is driven by the unrelenting pursuit of the best user experience possible. He inherently understands that the customer is the most valuable asset a company can have, and his attention to quality and customers has garnered raving fans all over the world.
Vanity — Open-Source Project
Creator and Developer (January 2010 – Present)Vanity is a tool for generating high-quality, user-friendly documentation from PHP source code. Vanity was written to address the user-hostile and generally unhelpful output that most existing documentation tools generate. Vanity came from the experience of working alongside users over nearly a decade of open-source software development, and has been heavily inspired by Rails API, jQ API, jQuery source viewer, Cocoa Developer Reference and Ingredients.app.
CloudFusion — Open-Source Project
Creator and Developer (Early 2005, July 2007 – Present)CloudFusion is a fast, powerful PHP toolkit for building awesome, cloud-based web applications in a fraction of the time! Design decisions are made in the best interests of performance, ease of use, and overall usability. Goals are to provide a high-performance developer toolkit for leveraging Amazon's cloud infrastructure, to grow the community and, and to build useful user-centric apps based on the toolkit.
Rearden Commerce — Foster City, CA
Senior User Experience Developer (July 2008 – March 2010)As a front-end engineer, Ryan was responsible for supporting the user experience team, Java developers, and widget development teams. This involved prototyping new features, integration of those new features into the code base, migrating JavaScript code from older frameworks to YUI 2.x, and educating other teams on the value of high-quality front-end code — all while placing a huge emphasis on writing front-end code with better performance, faster load times, and improved accessibility across the board.
WarpShare — Morgan Hill, CA
Co-Founder and Chief Information Officer (September 2006 – March 2010)WarpShare's mission is to support artists by eradicating digital media piracy in a manner consistent with a free and open future. With a next-generation file transfer protocol, socially-aware service, and a solution that turns traditional, television, and online advertising on its head, WarpShare is poised to be the first to provide the content industry with a successful, internet-native business model for the 21st century.
SimplePie — Open-Source Project
Creator and Co-Developer (July 2004 – October 2009), contributor (ongoing)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.
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.
Self-Employed
Consulting and development services (2007 – 2009)As a freelance developer, Ryan leverages a deep understanding of best practices in front-end development, layout and design, information architecture, usability, accessibility, and web culture to provide value to clients. He provides guidance to people and teams about how to maintain best practices after the project ends.
Yahoo! — Sunnyvale, CA
Front-end Web Developer (Contract), Yahoo! Messenger (November 2007 – January 2008)Ryan 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.
Ryan was 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
User Interface Developer (May 2005 – September 2006)Ryan was a 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 AJAX technologies.
Ryan was also a 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.
Ryan 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.
Acxiom Digital (née Digital Impact) — San Mateo, CA
Production Specialist (March 2004 – April 2005)Ryan 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.
Ryan 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.
Ryan's client experience included Banana Republic, SBC (now AT&T), Hewlett Packard (HP), Sony Style, Lexus, MAC Make-up.
Recommendations
A full list of recommendations can be found on my LinkedIn profile. Here are a few of my favorites.
Kevin Barrack — Senior Interaction Designer, Rearden Commerce
“Ryan is suspiciously clever. How can he know so much? How can he have such good ideas? We may never know the answers to these questions. He is very approachable and has a warm sense of humor. Have you offered Ryan a job yet? No? Then you are a fool.”
Adrien Cahen — Front-End Software Engineer, Yahoo!/Twitter
“Ryan is a rock star. Through his work on SimplePie, he has a healthy understanding of PHP and server-side concerns. He is extremely proficient in all aspects of modern web development [...]. He is aware and respectful of standards-body recommendations, but he knows that in the end, user satisfaction (as opposed to developer comfort) is most important. [...] [Ryan managed] to go above and beyond the call of duty by proposing and implementing creative solutions to the hurdles that appeared along the way.”
Scott Emmons — Java Performance Lead, Rearden Commerce
“Ryan is one of those rare developers who not only wants a functional product, but wants it to perform well, be scalable, and use best of breed technology. Sometimes these goals mean ignoring the status quo and pushing the boundaries of the box — this is a good thing and ultimately keeps the technology moving forward and getting better across many aspects of engineering.”
Brian Emmett — Operations Algorithms Manager, Netflix
“What has always impressed me about Ryan was his internal motivation for continual improvement. Whether it's creating software in his spare time or researching and implementing bleeding-edge UI techniques, I've always admired his drive. Coupled with a rich technical acumen and superior interpersonal skills, it was always a pleasure to work with him [...].”
Amelia Catalano — Senior User Experience Engineer, Rearden Commerce
“I had the pleasure of working with Ryan at Rearden Commerce, where I witnessed first-hand his tenacious work ethic and excellent project management skills. Ryan is an accomplished and tremendously talented web developer dedicated to innovation and web standards. He stands out among the rest as an Open Source guru who excels in both front-end and middle-tier technologies, and I believe he is one of the best developers I have had the chance to work with.”
Matthew Clower — Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Foleeo Inc.
“Ryan has both an excellent technical perspective and the drive to fight for the common user. He has a very wide understanding of development's, web services', and online communities' concepts and finds the best way to accomplish the tasks at hand. The caliber of his work is a rarity among his field and he pulls knowledge and services from the most applicable sources while interfacing quickly, effectively, and concurrently with design, development, strategic, marketing, and executive teams.”
Groups & Accomplishments
- Member, RSS Advisory Board (September 2007 – Present)
- Patent, Hive-based Peer-to-Peer Network (WO/2008/033424)
- Student guest speaker for the 2004 Silicon Valley College graduation ceremony.
Education
Western Career College (née Silicon Valley College) — San Jose, CA
Bachelor of Arts, Design and Visualization, November 2003. 3.84 GPA
Related Coursework: Web, graphic, multimedia, and publication design.