About the Author
Matt Ryan was born in 1971 in a small northeastern Utah town named Roosevelt. Matt spent his youth becoming an accomplished local pianist, jumping his bicycle off of every conceivable place in town, sustaining four concussions, lifeguarding at the local pool, and tying a still-standing high school record for highest recorded ACT score. In January 1991 Matt finally left Roosevelt to serve a two-year LDS mission to the Andalucia region of Spain, with a short stint in northern Africa to boot.
In spring of 1993 Matt returned from Spain and enrolled at Utah State University to pursue a degree in Computer Science. Matt spent a couple of memorable years living at the infamous Blue Light Club on Darwin Avenue and attending nearly every home football and basketball game. It was on Darwin Avenue that he met Amber Hansen of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the woman he would marry in 1995.
While in school Matt started working for Spillman Technologies as a software engineer, writing law enforcement database software. After graduation in December 1997 from Utah State, Matt took a position as a software engineer with IBM Global Services in Boulder, Colorado. In the year 2000, Novell offered Matt an opportunity on Novell’s digitalme team. The lure of this interesting technology was too much to resist, and Matt and Amber moved back to Utah that year.
Matt spent many years at Novell, working on digitalme, on management software for the Volera caching appliance, and on data center monitoring and management software. Matt also spent a number of years working in Novell’s Developer Services organization, where Matt proposed an idea that eventually became Novell Forge, which was a key initiative in helping Novell evolve to become a more open-source friendly company. It is also rumored that Matt’s document, “Reestablishing Netware,” which was sent directly to then-Vice-Chairman Chris Stone, was key in laying out a plan for Novell to move to an open source platform, although this rumor has never been confirmed.
In the year 2008, with Novell continuing to struggle and with no career growth prospects in sight, Matt left Novell with a great deal of nostalgia and took a position as Senior Software Engineer with an EMC subsidiary named Decho, originally known as Mozy (and still known as Mozy around these parts). After about a year there, he worked for two and a half years for Microsoft at their Utah Development Center on a number of different solutions for Microsoft’s Desktop Optimization Pack, a product suite most people haven’t heard about. When a great opportunity for learning, growth, and contribution presented itself at Jive Communications, Matt decided to get on that ship and he’s riding it today.
Matt and Amber are still happily married and living in Utah. Matt tends to build his own computers from parts and loves to build high-powered video gaming systems, even though he doesn’t play video games all that often. Much to Amber’s chagrin, Matt loves college and pro football and professional racing (AMA Supercross and Motocross, World Superbike, MotoGP, and Formula One) and appreciates his wife’s understanding in this regard. Motorcycle racing is a particular affinity, and Matt attends essentially every local AMA and World Superbike event and has also been known to attend AMA Supercross races in Las Vegas and Anaheim. When Matt does play video games, they are usually racing games like those in the Forza Motorsport series or F1 2010. Lately he’s been wasting way too much time playing Minecraft.
Matt still loves music. He plays his piano every so often, although the skill level is nothing like it was when he was a young teenager in Roosevelt. Matt owns two nice guitars, a black Ibanez RG350 electric with upgraded Seymour-Duncan pickups, and a natural-colored Takamine EG360 acoustic-electric with a rosewood back and sides; although he’s not very good, Matt really loves to play guitar and greatly appreciates talented guitar music. Rock concerts are another big affinity for Matt, who arranged with friends to drive all the way from Utah to Sacramento, CA to see Van Halen in November 2007.
Disclaimer: Basically, I disclaim everything. Nothing I write represents the views of Jive Communications, my current employer, or of any of my former employers (Microsoft, Mozy, Novell, IBM, etc.). Or the LDS church. In fact, I don’t even claim that my writings represent my own views.
