Ryan Williams

My Projects

Maybe you've seen one and I'd love to hear what you think about these.

• Place Signal
  Track the most popular places in a city near you. Used Google App Engine (Python), Django, Yahoo! GeoPlanet, Foursquare API, Twitter API, Google Maps API, jQuery.
  
  
• VentureMash
  Energizing early stage startups. What does your venture need? Have you listed your venture yet? VentureMash is built on Drupal and launched in 2009.
  
  
• LazyTweet (Sold in 2010)
  Not everybody has thousands of followers, so LazyTweet was created to give everybody a chance to get their burning questions answered. Call it social search, call it a q&a site, it doesn't matter. What matters is finding an answer to your question. LazyTweet was launched in 2008 and is built on the Google App Engine platform (python) and jQuery on the front-end.
  
  
• Local Signal
  Local Signal is a city-based feed aggregrator, built with PHP/MySQL. With over 50 cities currently available, Local Signal was created to have a single site to visit to keep track of the latest news, events, and social media (blog posts, social bookmarks, pictures, videos, etc.). The core feed engine primarily parses RSS but is flexible enough to work easily with custom formats found in various public web APIs. Other features include dynamic content display (utilizing YUI library) and click tracking to monitor popular content (using unobtrusive AJAX callbacks).
  
  
• Web 2.0 Innovation Map
  I developed this Google Maps mashup to highlight the explosion of new internet applications generally considered to be Web 2.0. This application was extremely popular, meriting mention by hundreds of bloggers including Tim O'Reilly and also making both the Digg home page and del.icio.us/popular. Technologies and techniques used for development included ASP.NET, XML, .NET XML classes, AJAX, the Google Maps API, and the Yahoo Geocoding API
  
  
• NetworthIQ (acquired by Strands in 2008)
  Co-founder and lead developer for this innovative social personal finance website launched in July 2005. NetworthIQ was built on ASP.NET/MySQL and utilized a number of modern internet technologies and techniques including AJAX, RSS, tags, javascript badges/widgets, and Third Party APIs. NetworthIQ grew to over 19,000 registered users and has been included in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, and was included in many "Top Web 2.0" lists.
  
  

Toolbox

By day, I'm a software engineer building applications in .NET (C#). But, I consider myself to be a pragmatic developer and enjoy discovering new web technologies. I've developed apps in ASP.NET (MVC and WebForms), WCF, Ruby (Rails and Sinatra), PHP (custom and Drupal), App Engine (Python), Java, and even ColdFusion back in the day. I've led front-end teams, going deep into Javascript, AJAX, and CSS and I've managed entire stacks from front-end to database.