Greetings Steemians,
First of all, I apologize for not posting this before my other articles. I hope it's better that I'm late to the party than not ever to be found.
My name is Ryan and I grew up in Houston, TX. I went to Cypress Springs High School, but admittedly, I wasn't the best student. I got into computers and stayed up late playing Quake in those days which caused much of my sleep to happen in class. Adding to this, my family also moved around quite a bit causing other issues and eventually I found myself in Bellingham, WA. I did happen to pick up the guitar during my time in Texas, so it wasn't all for not.
I likes Music
In Bellingham, I joined a semi-successful band and even found myself touring the West Coast one summer. The band was International Businessmen (or IB). There's not much to be found of the project on the web, but I was able to save a morsel here (I apologize ahead of time for both the subject matter AND the peaked audio):
I ended up leaving IB in 2003 because I really wanted to front a band; not just play guitar. I spent a couple years writing some less than charming songs and in 2005, I formed Strait A Students. For about 3 years, I poured my heart and soul into that project and we did some pretty cool things... like getting ourselves on Pandora and also on some of those digital jukeboxes found in bars. We also made this really stupid music video:
I likes Footballs
I'm also a big American Football fan and was fortunate enough to see the Seahawks win a title with some of my best friends:
I also watched the Hawks lose one the following year... and in the most depressing fashion.
Even Demaryius Thomas would have wanted Lynch to run it in...
Ok, maybe not, but yes, that's me with DT. My Wife is from Colorado. Her aunt, uncle and his family used to live right next door to him. It was pretty surreal meeting one of the NFL's most prolific wide receivers, and I'm so glad I was wearing my Lynch jersey that day! Speaking of my Wife, we dated for eight years and finally tied the knot last year at the beautiful Lairmont Manor in Bellingham, WA. Our friend Jed drove with his family all the way from Montana so he could sing the song for our first dance.
I likes Code
I'm also an aspiring software developer as of 2012. After doing sales and marketing for roughly 7 years, I decided I would like to acquire some new skills and landing a job writing SQL. I've learned a fair share of HTML/CSS since then, too and have become pretty handy busting out small web apps with Ruby on Rails. As of 2015, I spend my days writing PHP and Ruby for the Cloud Security Alliance.
I also very recently threw together a small crypto tracking app called MyCoinBag. You can use it to track your crypto holdings. Here's a little screenshot:
I have many deeply rooted friendships here and had no idea, when I moved to Bellingham in 2000, that I would still be here 14 years later. I am so incredibly fortunate to have found a place I can call home in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. That's about all I have, so I'll leave you with a photo of my friends and I doing our best 80's impression.... thanks for reading!
