About Me?
July 24th, 2007
This blog focuses on programming and web development from the perspective of, well, me.
My name is Ryan: 20-going-on-15 years old. I’m a Junior in my Computer Science (and Math) majors at The University of Washington in Seattle, WA. The CS department is among the top ten in the world, and the university itself is the most-funded research university in the world after Johns Hopkins.
I have been doing Web development for about 10 years and programming for about as long. Back then, when I first started all this, CSS was almost unheard of, boy bands ruled the earth, and we grievously lay out our pages in HTML tables and regrettably forked Apache for every parsed request. This is now, though: we have divs and spans and liquid layouts and post-industrial metal and frameworks for almost everything. Web development firms are on-par with the top software development firms, even post-dot-com-boom.
Therein is my point in this whole past-versus-now charade. Web development is becoming a necessary skill (some might say necessary evil). Emerging to this level is indicative of a new trend in the whole computing industry.
I teach a series of Web Publishing workshops to students, staff, and faculty here at the University. We develop and maintain so-called online curricula
for these workshops. In all, this amounts to teaching others how to engineer new technologies out of existing ones. When not actively involved in teaching the workshops, I develop and maintain the technologies that support their instruction, including a database used to track attendance and notes evaluations and the like. I am involved in and around the field, working on many projects simultaneously.
When not doing Web-related stuff, my computing is focused on the development of application frameworks. I have contributed to now-defunct, open-source frameworks for JavaScript and am currently independently developing a Java-based framework for simple relational database management.
I am a Mac and UNIX/Linux user. I work primarily in Emacs and variants. My favorite programming language is PHP (the first I ever learned) followed closely by C and Perl. I am not an Apple fanboy or a Microsoft hater. I do not consider Computer Science to be a more difficult or more admirable major than any other.
Apart from computers and all that tom-geekery, I consider myself a fairly normal college student: I have friends and a decent social life and a good relationship with my parents. I was a boy scout for some time (and am now a badge-wearing Eagle Scout). I took concert piano lessons for 12 years. I studied French in highschool (and middle school) for 6 years and in college for another year; I was able to visit central and southern France two summers ago. I like almost all kinds of music and am partial to acoustic covers of pop songs. I’m gay and have been “out of the closet” for some time. I have no problem with effeminate gay men; I am simply not one of them. I have math tattooed on my wrists and have always wanted an eyebrow piercing. I’m not afraid of spiders but am afraid of things that look like spiders. I would love to be a highschool math teacher or a college CS lecturer, but I’m focusing on the subjects for the time-being.
I plan to graduate at the end of March, 2010 with BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. From there, who knows?
Email me (ryan-at-ganon-dot-com) with any thoughts or love letters