Résumé
Work I've done. Things I've created.
Ryan Parman is an end-to-end product developer. He is a full-stack web engineer who is fiercely passionate about the user experience and interaction of a product. 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.
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End-to-end Product Developer
Product Manager • Interaction Designer • Full-Stack Web Engineer
I bring more than 15 years of experience in building for the web. My experience and interests run the gamut from user interaction design, through web development and front-end engineering, software engineering and infrastructure, along with the project management experience to pull it all together, and the product experience to ensure that our customers are delighted at each point where they touch our brand.
Like many people, I want to enjoy my work. I want to feel like I'm having a positive impact on the lives of the customers I support. Those might be internal customers, or they might be external customers. Either way, I want to make their lives easier, better and happier.
I've worked for startups, Fortune 500s, and companies in-between. I can say that I enjoy the passion, hunger and customer-focus of startups (or companies/teams that operate like startups) with the financial security of a Fortune 500. I've learned that I enjoy my work far more when my customers are living, breathing human beings (B2C) — not faceless corporate entities (B2B). My experience at Amazon has been fantastic in this regard.
I'm interested in roles where I'm allowed — nay, encouraged — to keep my hands and eyes on a product every step of the way. Where ownership means not only responsibility when things go wrong, but also the authority to make the necessary decisions for its success. Where I can manage and build a project without having to spend all day in meetings. Where I'm encouraged to challenge the status quo to find newer, better ways of doing things. Where I can work alongside designers, web devs, engineers, and product people to provide the best possible experience for our customers.
Technical Skills and Software
Development Setup
OS X, Sublime Text, Terminal.app
Highly Proficient (7–10)
- Standard User Experience Skillset:
- Human–Computer Interaction Design, Contingency Design
- Standard Front-End Engineering Toolbox:
- HTML 5, XHTML 1, XML 1, CSS 3, YAML, SVG, DOM, real JavaScript, JavaScript Events, JSON, Front-End Performance, jQuery, Sizzle, YUI 2.x, MVC design pattern, LESS, Recess, JSHint, Bootstrap, YUI Compressor, Google Closure Compiler, UglifyJS, Juicer, WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 web accessibility guidelines, progressive enhancement principles, responsive design patterns and more!
- HTML5 & CSS 3:
- Application Cache, Geolocation, History API, Video (e.g., MPEG-4/H.264, Ogg/Theora, WebM/VP8), Selectors, Gradients, Media Queries, Local Storage, Transforms, Animations, Animations, Data Attributes, Building custom Icon Fonts, and more!
- Standard Software Engineering Toolbox:
- OOP fundamentals,
dependency injection, metaprogramming, polymorphism, performance, reflection,
character encoding manipulation, Git,
GitHub, Subversion,
Mac OS X, RHEL,
Ubuntu, Fedora,
Windows,
find,grep,cat,>,>>,|,nanoand more!
- PHP Development Toolbox:
- PEAR, Composer, Packagist, PHPT, PHPDocumentor, Vanity, Pirum, Satis, Monolog, Process, Filesystem, Finder, EventDispatcher, Console, Class Loader, Slim Framework, Twig, Guzzle, AWS SDK for PHP, cURL, SimpleXML, DOMDocument, iconv, mbstring, APC, XCache, Xdebug (profiling, cachegrind), garbage collector, namespaces, traits, anonymous functions, SPL, magic methods, PSR recommendations and more!
- Cloud Computing Services:
- Amazon EC2 (virtual servers), Amazon Linux, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront (CDN), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SimpleDB, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon CloudWatch (monitoring), AWS Elastic Beanstalk (app deployments), AWS CloudFormation (infrastructure templates), Amazon CloudSearch, Amazon SQS (message queue), Amazon SNS (notifications), Amazon Route 53 (DNS management), Amazon VPC (private cloud), Amazon S3 (storage), Amazon EBS (persistent disk storage)
- Metadata Formats:
- RSS, Media RSS, Atom, Microformats
Proficient (4–6)
- Standard User Experience Skillset
- Usability Testing, Copywriting, Interface Design, Information Architecture, Product Marketing, Community Development
- Standard Software Engineering Toolbox:
- MacPorts, Homebrew,
RubyGems, npm,
yum,apt-get,make,rake,ant,vi
- UI/Unit/Integration Testing:
- PHPUnit, Selenium, Behat, Mink, PhantomJS, iOS Driver, Travis, automated-screenshot-diff
- Metadata Formats:
- RDFa, Dublin Core, FOAF, CommonTag, OpenSearch
- Infrastructure & Deployment:
- Capistrano 2.x
- Cloud Computing Services:
- Amazon SES (bulk email), Amazon RDS (MySQL server), Amazon ElastiCache (Memcache), Amazon Glacier (archiving), Amazon Import/Export, Eucalyptus Community Cloud (private cloud), Google Storage (storage)
- Frameworks:
- Zend Framework, Silex
- API & Scalable System Design:
- Understanding and designing highly-scalable, distributed systems for running web applications and web services (e.g., cloud computing). RESTful web service API design, HATEOAS pattern.
- Visual Design Tools:
- Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Pixelmator
- Odds-and-ends:
- Organic search engine optimization, Apache Web Server, NGINX, PHP FPM, Markdown, Eclipse PDT, Aptana Studio, HTML5 Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
Limited Experience Worth Mentioning (1–3)
- HTML5 Microdata, Persona/user research, Rails, MySQL, Sass, Haml, DocBook, Rackspace CloudFiles, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop), Amazon SWF (workflows)
Work Experience
WePay — Palo Alto, CA
Senior Full-Stack Engineer (April 2014 – Present)Description TBD.
Amazon — Seattle, WA
Web Development Engineer II, Amazon Web Services (March 2010 – April 2014)Ryan is the creator and visionary behind the AWS SDK for PHP — AWS's SDK for rapidly building cloud-based web applications (launched September 2010). He invests heavily in supporting the needs of developers by taking the time to listen and understand the needs of developers, and is involved in PHP-related industry groups on behalf of AWS.
Ryan worked with the AWS Elastic Beanstalk team to provide PHP support for the platform (launched March 2012). In addition to working with the PHP community to determine the configuration for a PHP container that would fit the greatest number of developers, he developed a rigorous internal test suite for testing containers which has been used as the basis for testing by other language-specific teams. He also had early input on adding support for git push deployments.
Ryan was heavily involved in the creation and development of the AWS SDK for PHP 2 — a best-of-breed SDK (backed by Guzzle — a best-of-breed HTTP framework) that takes into account the numerous changes in the PHP language and community since Tarzan/CloudFusion was first written in 2005 (launched November 2012).
Ryan also works with the AWS Design team on the AWS Management Console, where he lends his experience as a web developer and software engineer to bridge the gap between the design and engineering disciplines in an effort to build a high-quality, robust, user-friendly console for interacting with Amazon Web Services.
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 (née Tarzan) — Open-Source Project
Creator and Developer (Early 2005, July 2007 – March 2010)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.
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.
Will Merydith — Sr. Program Manager, Azure, Microsoft
“Ryan is one of the most customer focused individuals I have worked with. He takes great pride in his work and is constantly evaluating how to improve the end user experience. He backs his opinions with customer feedback and data, and I often relied on Ryan to help me deliver a better experience to user, in a short period of time.”
Brendan Dixon — Software Development Manager, AWS Website, Amazon Web Services
“What I appreciate about Ryan is his obsession to detail and customers. Ryan refuses to let business politics to ever interfere with doing what is best for customers. He invests himself to discover the best solutions and then make them available. I wholly trust Ryan's evaluation of front-end engineers and Information Architecture. Ryan would make a solid contribution to any team requiring solid front-end skills blended with a deep customer concern.”
Brian Thompson — Web Developer, Amazon
“Ryan has sort of become my informal mentor regarding my web development role within Amazon. He's passionate about what he does, he's extremely talented and his "can-do" approach to projects makes him valuable on any team he becomes a part of. Perhaps even more importantly than his direct contributions to a given role however is his steady presence in stress, the ability to absorb (and apply) new information and technology quickly and and unquestioned desire to see those around him succeed. I pride myself in my profession and look up to Ryan as a mentor, a colleague and a friend. Ryan Parman is an outstanding, well-rounded and positive leader who inspires confidence in those who appeal to him for technical help or simply solid advice. I hope Amazon never loses him for greener pastures.”
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
- Voting Representative for AWS, PHP Framework Interoperability Group (2012 – 2013)
- Member, RSS Advisory Board (2007 – 2009)
- Patent, Hive-based Peer-to-Peer Network (WO/2008/033424)
- Student guest speaker for the 2004 Silicon Valley College graduation ceremony.
Education
Carrington College California (part of DeVry University) (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.