About

Ryan Taylor

A brief history of me.

The Past

In the beginning, I was a lowly IT Technician. Dismantling computers was all I wanted to do but I found after 7 years that I was really bored. Computer breaks = replace it, software corrupts = reinstall it, computer still doesn’t work = kick it!

So, I started thinking about a career change. A hobby that has stayed with me since I was a kid is drawing. In fact, I’ve always considered myself to be quite creative and for a short time I thought I might like to get into 3D animation and texturing. There was just one problem... I wasn’t very good at it, although while I was still in that mind set I found one of my favourite websites, which I still visit for inspiration to this day, CGSociety.

I actually stumbled into web design. My wife is involved with a charity called the YCA, and they wanted their website re-designing. Obviously working in IT I must have known all about building websites. After all, websites load up on computers, and I was a Technician, perfect logic in my wife’s mind and like the dutiful husband that I am, I began to looking into re-designing their site.

I got the bug!

The Present

Today I’m employed as a Web Developer for Leeds College of Art & Design building internal and external applications, maintaining the intranet, and drinking lots of tea.

I’ve been very lucky at the college as they’ve sent me on some top quality training courses such as Bulletproof Ajax with Jeremy Keith and Linux/Unix Fundamentals.

By far the biggest project I am involved with is boagworld, the world’s longest running web design podcast. I first met Paul Boag at the recording of his 100th show and he has recently asked me to join the boagworld team in the role of Producer, to which I’m completely honoured and thoroughly excited about doing!

Outside of work, I enjoy listening to audio books (which I call reading but many would disagree), playing music (but I’m much better at listening to it), scuba diving (preferably somewhere warm as opposed to freezing English quarries) and preparing for the arrival of my first child (codename Walnut)

The Future?

Where do I want to be in five years? I picture myself working within a team of enthusiastic, likeminded individuals, building exciting and technology rich websites.

I’d love to appear in .net magazine (they have this knack of making geeks look cool!) and I definitely want a boat, with blue flames down the sides (and I don’t mean a canal boat!)