Ryan Snyder: Archive

May 2nd

Mar 31st

Meat Club →

Tips and charcuterie recipes for starting your own Meat Club.

Mar 22nd

4 tags

Bringing Distributed Teams Together

I worked at Mozilla, and recently started working at BankSimple. Both are distributed companies, and both require tremendous efforts to ensure that remote team members are on the same page and working together. It goes without saying that periods of face time are necessary to help people feel like they are truly part of a team. I helped define the schedule to facilitate team building for...

Sep 8th

11 notes

Joining BankSimple

For the past 2 years, I’ve been working with Mozilla to help push its mission forward — doing whatever it takes to create a better web. It’s been wonderful to work with such a group of selfless individuals who are all focused on creating technologies that enhance the web, while fighting for users’ privacy and rights in the process. A month ago, Alex Payne called me while I was awaiting my...

Jun 29th

1 note

1 tag

Cha-Cha-Changes in Mozilla Web Production →

May 5th

5 notes

1 tag

Enabling Community Incubation at Mozilla →

May 2nd

2 notes

2 tags

What I'm Doing at Mozilla

I’ve held the role of Web Developer at Mozilla for a couple of years now, writing PHP and Python for various projects. But I haven’t written a single line of code in well over a month, which meant I had already transitioned into a new set of job responsibilities. Many a Mozillian jokes that my new role is to unplug websites. While that is partially true, my real focus for the past couple...

Apr 12th

6 notes

nomnomnomming on noms.in

Around Christmastime, I flew over to Thailand for a week of vacation in Phang Nga and a couple weeks of work, play and eating in Chiang Mai. In Chiang Mai, I was visiting Dietrich Ayala, who described to me one of his major frustrations with living in Southeast Asia. It seems that most websites featured recommended restaurants that catered to the western palate, like burger joints, Irish pubs...

Feb 1st

5 notes

Mozilla Website Archive →

In order to keep a tree healthy, you have to prune its branches.

Jan 13th

5 notes

4 tags

Portland Top Fives for 2010

Every year I put together a list of my 5 favorite Portland establishments for food, drinks and coffee. Here are my top five faves for 2010: Restaurants 1. DOC 2. Ned Ludd 3. Pok Pok 4. Clarklewis 5. Broder Libations 1. Beaker and Flask 2. Apex 3. Saraveza 4. Biwa 5. Victory Coffee 1. Coava 2. Spella 3. Barista (Alberta) 4. The Red E 5. Public Domain

Jan 6th

5 notes

1 tag

My Writing, 1999-2004

I’ve been in the process of cleaning out the hard disk of an old computer that I’m donating to a local non-profit organization. In doing so, I’ve run into the pieces I wrote between 1999-2004, some of which I’ve decided to publish on Scribd. Finding your Path: Using Divine Guidance to Determine Your Life’s Direction After selling Cram Session back in December 1998, I spent some time putzing about...

Jan 4th

4 notes

2 tags

Finding your Path

As I’ve mentioned in other recent blog posts, I’ve been in the process of cleaning out the hard disk of an old computer that I’m donating to a local non-profit organization. In doing so, I’ve run into many of my writings from 1999-2004, which I’ve decided to publish. Including a book. After selling Cram Session back in December 1998, I spent some time putzing about...

Jan 2nd

9 notes

3 tags

The Mortician's Son

Back in college at The Ohio State University, I took a non-fiction writing course, and decided for one of the assignments that I would write a short memoir about growing up in a funeral home. My father was a mortician in a 4 generation family business, and my family lived in the house connected to the funeral home. Whenever I recount a story from my childhood, people inevitably ask me,...

Dec 29th

6 notes

5 tags

Giovanni Pascoli Myricae Translations in English

I attended college at The Ohio State University, where I graduated with Bachelors degrees in English and Italian. My senior year I worked on a self-study course where the sole purpose was to translate 20 of Giovanni Pascoli’s poems. It has been 7 years since I translated these poems, but felt it was time to make them publicly available so that others could explore the works of Pascoli....

Dec 29th

18 notes

Foodgeeks Thanksgiving Recipes →

Oct 28th

2 tags

Beergeeks - For the love of Beer

In October 1998, my homebrewing buddy Ken Hahn convinced me to buy the domain name Beergeeks.com. We launched a simple site in December 1998, and at the time it hosted homebrewing information and all of our homebrew recipes. I gobbled up a few other related domain names, notably Foodgeeks.com and Winegeeks.com, and gradually published sites on those domains over the years. But Beergeeks was a...

Sep 21st

1 tag

Joining Mozilla

Shortly after the Shizzow crew began ramping down our efforts, I began contracting with Mozilla, starting in the summer of 2009. I’ve mainly been performing PHP development for a number of projects, including the Crash Reporter, Creative Collective, Jetpack Gallery (now a part of Mozilla Add-Ons) and the Bespin Plugin Gallery. Today, I’m excited to say that I’m joining the...

Aug 30th

1 tag

Uncle Craig's Words to Live By

My dear Uncle Craig passed away on Friday from a valiant 10 month fight against brain cancer. Damnit, I miss that guy. Before he left us, he took the time to scribble down the words which he lived by every day of his life. He was an ornery kind of guy, but always stayed true to his heart, and when it was time to be serious he would open his mouth and dispense sage advice in simple...

Aug 30th

2 tags

Announcing the Bespin Plugin Gallery

The past couple months at Mozilla I’ve been plugging away (sorry for the pun) at the Bespin Plugin Gallery, and we’ve announced today that it’s officially live. Yay! But wait, let’s back up a sec. First we need to talk about Bespin, because most of the people I talk to don’t know about this Mozilla-sponsored project. Bespin is a code editor that you can embed...

Jul 29th

1 tag

200,000 Icons in the Icon Rainbow

In the initial launch of Icon Rainbow, an icon color analyzer, we featured a small subset of 5,000 icons from the Apple iTunes store. But Crystal and I knew that Icon Rainbow couldn’t be considered a fully developed project until we had the icons for all of the iPhone apps in the iTunes app store. Well, it’s official - the Icon Rainbow now features the icons for all 200,000 apps in the iTunes...

Jul 19th

2 tags

Creating Convenience when following Pollan's Food...

For the month of June, I made a number of commitments to myself, including following the guidelines laid out by Michael Pollan in his book Food Rules. Following these rules wasn’t terribly difficult, as I already practiced a number of guidelines laid out in the book. But where I got tripped up the most was on the days I was working long hours and needed quick, convenient meals and beverages to...

Jul 4th

Watch

We just launched a new feature on Foodgeeks that shows all of the seasonal fruits and vegetables that are grown fresh in your state at the current moment. I’m talking briefly about this feature, but also encouraging people to thing ingredients first, not recipes first, when preparing meals.

Jun 11th

1 tag

Hitting the Reset of Button

I haven’t felt the best recently. I haven’t been sick - I just constantly feel like I’m tired and recovering from overworking, overplaying or overindulging. And when I’m in recovery mode, I don’t feel like I’m fully present, and therefore not able to really to give it my all in my work life or in my personal life. So, this month I’m hitting the reset...

Jun 2nd

3 tags

Upgrading from Kohana 2.3.x to 2.4

At Mozilla we’re using Kohana as the PHP framework behind a number of our sites, including the UI for the Crash Reporter, the Creative Collective and Jetpack Gallery. I’ve been upgrading one of our sites from Kohana 2.3.4 to Kohana 2.4 to determine how difficult it will be to upgrade our other Kohana sites. For a dot release, this upgrade is much more time intensive than I’d...

May 19th

1 note

3 tags

Hey, ho, it's the Icon Rainbow!

If you know me, then you know that I get really bored when I am not dealing with a wacky problem that needs to be solved. When Crystal Beasley (@skinny) approached me with an idea about writing a color analyzer to help quench her one of her geeky designer itches, I couldn’t turn down solving such a fun problem. The Icon Rainbow (@iconrainbow) is a color analyzer for iPhone app icons. In...

May 10th

1 note

May 10th

Shizzow: What I would have done differently

It’s been nearly 3 months since I announced that I left Shizzow, and I’ve finally been removed from it long enough to write a reflection piece. I definitely share Dawn Foster’s sentiments in her great reflection post and promise not to repeat too much of what she stated. I will reiterate that we definitely spent too much time putting the cart before the horse, whether...

Apr 25th

Watch

This is me discussing the food revolution and some thoughts on how Foodgeeks can help make embracing the revolution a little less daunting for new foodies.

Apr 16th