Ryan Parman

Current

Senior User Experience Developer at Rearden Commerce
Creator and Developer at Tarzan [Open Source Project]
Consulting and development services for hire at Freelance Web Developer

Founder and Chief Information Officer at LifeNexus Digital (née Foleeo)
Creator and Co-Developer at SimplePie [Open Source Project]

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Past

Frontend Web Developer, Messenger at Yahoo!
User Interface Developer at Stryker
Production Specialist at Acxiom Digital (née Digital Impact)

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Education

Silicon Valley College
Merced College
Fresno City College

Live Oak High School
Sanger High School

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2 more...

Recommended

11 people have recommended Ryan

Connections

160 connections

Industry

Online Media

Websites

Ryan Parman’s Summary

Ryan Parman is the creator and co-developer of SimplePie — a very fast and easy-to-use API, written in PHP, that puts the 'simple' back into 'really simple syndication' (RSS). Flexible enough to suit beginners and veterans alike, SimplePie is focused on speed, ease of use, compatibility and standards compliance, and is quickly gaining raving fans all over the world for its simplicity, ease of use, and because "it just works."

He is also the co-founder of LifeNexus Digital, a startup in the digital media space that is developing a new service called WarpShare — a viable commercial solution that solves the ever-increasing rift between labels, studios, advertisers, and digital media consumers like you and me.

Besides SimplePie and WarpShare, Ryan was the lead front-end developer for the Spring '08 re-launch of the Yahoo! Messenger website. He also had his 15 minutes of web developer fame as the guy who packaged the standalone versions of Internet Explorer into easy-to-use bundles and made them available on his website before handing them over to Evolt's browser archive, Quirksmode, and Tredosoft to distribute.

Ryan's background is as a front-end web developer with substantial experience with web standards, layered semantic markup, working with XML/JSON/PHP/REST-based web services, and content syndication and aggregation. He is experienced with organic SEO methods, front-end performance tuning, and usability and user-centered design principles. Ryan is participating in the W3C HTML5 Working Group, the RSS Advisory Board, the Data Portability initiative, Microformats.org, and other industry groups, as well as being a vocal supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons.

Ryan Parman’s Specialties:

Web Standards, XHTML, XML, CSS 2, Layered Semantic Markup (LSM), unobtrusive JavaScript/JSON, AJAX, PHP, SEO, RSS, Atom, syndication, Subversion/CVS, usability, user-centered design, web accessibility, cross-browser development, project management, website performance and scalability, startup environments, business planning, working with remote teams, managing a successful open-source project, marketing, copy writing, etc.

Ryan Parman’s Experience

Senior User Experience Developer

Rearden Commerce

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

July 2008 — Present (4 months)

Leveraged a deep understanding of best practices in front-end development when translating visual designs to functional code, and collaborate with Engineering on integration details. Developed more efficient methods for multi-platform development and testing of front-end code. Co-developed a front-end framework, which will provide a method for rapid prototyping using a standard set of templates, widgets, and other re-usable components. Provided maintenance to existing builds and releases, bug fixes, and documentation.
Creator and Developer

Tarzan [Open Source Project]

(Internet industry)

July 2007 — Present (1 year 4 months)

Tarzan is a fast, powerful PHP toolkit for building web applications with Amazon Web Services. Tarzan supports Amazon S3 (storage), EC2 (cloud computing), SQS (messaging), AAWS (product data), and SimpleDB (simple databasing). Design decisions are made in the best interests of performance, ease of use, and overall usability. Tarzan's goals are to provide a high-performance developer toolkit for leveraging Amazon’s in-the-cloud infrastructure, to grow the community around it to leverage understanding and, and to build useful user-centric apps based on the toolkit.
Consulting and development services for hire

Freelance Web Developer

(Computer Software industry)

2007 — Present (1 year)

As a freelance web developer, Ryan has leveraged 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 also provides guidance to people and teams about how to maintain best practices after the project ends. Clients have included Synonym, Inc. (http://asynonym.com), New Beginnings Church, and individual developers.
Founder and Chief Information Officer

LifeNexus Digital (née Foleeo)

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Online Media industry)

September 2006 — Present (2 years 2 months)

Ryan is involved in the strategic planning and development of business, marketing, and technological goals for LifeNexus Digital. Having a background in web development and usability, Ryan oversees the development of the Information Architecture and User Experience pieces of the WarpShare service, and is the co-architect of WarpShare's server-side LAMP stack (including an Amazon cloud computing environment). He has been involved in performance tuning in the server/data stack, PHP-based MVC layer, and on the client-side, and he has successfully championed user-centric ideals and user-centered design principles throughout the organization.
Creator and Co-Developer

SimplePie [Open Source Project]

(Internet industry)

July 2004 — Present (4 years 4 months)

Ryan is the creator, evangelist, and co-developer of the SimplePie project -- an API library, written in PHP, that enables web developers to simply and easily integrate RSS and Atom 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. Ryan spends a lot of time looking for pain points involved in working with feeds, and works to simplify those irritants from the developer's workflow, enabling a more efficient experience.

Under his vision, guidance, and people-oriented approach, SimplePie has seen explosive growth in the developer community, and has been hailed as one of the best software libraries available for managing syndication feeds.
Frontend Web Developer, Messenger

Yahoo!

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)

November 2007 — January 2008 (3 months)

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, server and client-side caching, gzipping, image spriting, code minification, and reduced HTTP requests, resulting in exceptional load times for A-grade desktop web browsers. He was also involved in upgrading and porting the existing site over to a pure PHP5-based MVC framework.
User Interface Developer

Stryker

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; SYK; Medical Devices industry)

May 2005 — September 2006 (1 year 5 months)

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.
Production Specialist

Acxiom Digital (née Digital Impact)

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; ACXM; Marketing and Advertising industry)

March 2004 — April 2005 (1 year 2 months)

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.