About Ryan

Ryan Parman is the creator and co-developer of SimplePie — a very fast and easy-to-use PHP software library that has substantially lowered the barrier-to-entry for developers to access information held in blogs and other RSS feeds. Under his direction, SimplePie has been hailed as one of the best software libraries available for managing RSS and Atom feeds, and is quickly gaining raving fans all over the world for its simplicity and ease of use. He is also the co-founder of Foleeo, 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. Ryan was the lead developer behind the Spring '08 re-launch of the Yahoo! Messenger website, which is one of Yahoo's top properties. He also had his 15 minutes of fame as the web developer who — to the excitement of tens of thousands of web developers from all over the world — packaged the standalone versions of Internet Explorer into the easy to use bundles that Evolt's browser archive, Quirksmode, and Tredosoft are currently distributing. 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 lives in California's Silicon Valley with his wife and kids, is a Christian and a prefectionist, has a very snarky and sarcastic sense of humor, has a technically-oriented INFJ personality type, and doesn't vote down party lines.

Key Info

Position Desired	Not Specified
Willing to Relocate	No
Commuting Distance	Up to 30 miles
Acceptable Travel	No Preference
U.S. Work Authorization	U.S. Citizen
Eligible for U.S. Security Clearance	No

Salary

Current Salary: $100,000 to $150,000
Desired Salary: $100,000 to $150,000

Interview

What did you learn from your previous job? (05/08/2008)

I've learned that people are very important. That might sound obvious, but you would be surprised at how often we forget that. If those people are on the job, it's important to realize that you need to take care of your people. I've learned that creating your own business is a ridiculous amount of work -- way, way, way more than you ever thought it would be. At the same, the company's success is your success. Be successful. Make it happen. I've learned a lot about building web applications, optimization, and although I still don't know everything there is to know (or even everything I need to know), I'm dedicated to learning those very things. I've learned that people don't read and people don't follow directions. Plan for it. Don't be surprised when it happens. See #1. I've learned that having a homogenous company culture is less important than working with good people who know what they're doing. I've learned that "personality exams" are bogus, and that you shouldn't expect the technical guy to fare well on a personality test designed for a sales guy.

What are you most passionate about? (05/08/2008)

People-centric technology -- less in the "social" sense, and more in the "usability" sense. Too many times I've seen people get angry and frustrated with something technological, and 9 times out of 10 it's because that technological thing was poorly designed and/or implemented. What drives me is to take technology -- no matter how geeky -- think about how it could be useful to people (such as myself, my wife, my parents, my kids), and find some way to bring it down to a more "human" level. Depending on the audience, that might mean thinking through a more efficient way of creating an API, tweaking font sizes and colors, or making BitTorrent easy enough for my mom to use.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years? (05/08/2008)

I'll continue to be involved in kickstarting new technology companies. This might be in an advisory role, an executive role, or as a major investor. I want to take the best ideas out there, make them better, and push them to fruition.

How would your co-workers describe you? (10/18/2007)

I would direct you to my LinkedIn profile to see what people have actually said about me. http://www.linkedin.com/in/rparman

What are your strengths? Weaknesses? (10/18/2007)

My technical skill set is entirely self-taught. The benefit of this is that my knowledge is based on actual trial and error so that I know what works and what doesn't. The things that I'm interested in and have spent time delving into are generally very strong skill sets. The drawback is that because I don't have a formal education in programming (e.g. computer science), I'm not always familiar with programming terms that are used in the industry although I may very well know how to do them. Additionally, I've learned many new things out of necessity, so if I haven't needed to learn certain things, then I may not know about them just yet. However I am a quick learner with a solid base in programming and technology so I tend to adapt new skills quickly once I begin upon the learning path. In terms of co-running a technology company the technology and usability pieces (i.e. development and user-centered aspects), but it takes more effort for me to grasp the business aspects (i.e. how much is this work worth?). Marketing tends to be split in that I'm able to design, layout, and arrange something in a way that draws users to where they should go, as well as going out and evangelizing the products and services via the web, but at the same time I have no idea which metrics are important and what should be tracked. Thankfully I'm running a company with two guys who are very strong in other areas, and I've been able to learn a great deal from them so I'm getting better at those types of things. I'm passionate about technology, building things the best way, and about people and the user experience. User experience is more than a good design that has been usability tested, but it's also planning contingency design and opening a dialogue with people to ensure that they're problems are being solved. It's easy to design for when things go right. It's much harder to design for getting people back on track when things go wrong. I think another of my strengths is realizing that I don't always have the right answer or the best idea, and that I can defer to somebody else when their idea is truly better. I believe that it's very important to check your ego at the door, so that you decide what the BEST decision or idea is instead of getting hurt because it wasn't YOUR idea.