I’m Ryan.
Hello! Thanks for wanting to know more about me.
(And thank you to Robert Paul for the gracious permission to use his work as my cover photo for this page.)
I’m a family man.
I live in the St. Louis metro area with my wife and five children. My wife is the most amazing woman on the planet. Some of my children are teenagers now. It’s more awesome than frightening, by the way.
I work in support engineering at Automattic.
My full-time work is in helping clients at WordPress.com VIP unlock the full potential of our hosted WordPress platform. I have been at Automattic since 2010, and I enjoy it more each day. I get to work with amazing, intelligent people and work on solutions that actively make online publishing better and more inclusive. You should consider applying to work with me.
I’m a Twitch streamer.
I maintain a somewhat-regular online presence as Backlogathon, where I have a streaming presence on Twitch. I mostly use it to stream out of my home, where I play games I haven’t yet completed as well as explore games with my children. You can learn how to support my streaming efforts here.
I’m also available for event streaming work on weekends in the Midwest and specifically in the greater St. Louis area. If you’d like me to help with your event, please contact me.
I help run some of the biggest Fighting Game Community tournaments in the world.
I’ve been staffing Combo Breaker since 2016, Frosty Faustings since 2018, and Evo since 2019. In that work, I’ve had many responsibilities, including tournament organizing, large-scale bracket running, running brackets for live stream, volunteer security, audio/visual setup, and assistant stream direction.
I also direct and produce my own streams every month for Ultima, the monthly FGC event in St. Louis.
I’d love to help you with your event if you’re interested. Please contact me if you’d like to talk.
I believe in open source.
I’ve been working with open source projects for many years, and believe open source is important to our technological future. I have been working with WordPress for well over a decade, and I use a livestreaming toolchain that is almost completely open source. My personal site code and streaming layouts are also open sourced, both under my personal account and my streamer organization on GitHub.