Hey there, I’m Ryan Florence.

At age 15 (1997), I got my first job ever as a web designer for a local ISP (remember those?) making $7.50/hr. Back then if you knew rowspan and colspan you were king. Outside of the sites I did for work, I mostly made sites for local punk rock bands (including my own) with notepad.exe, until DreamWeaver beta was given out for free. I even won a $1,000 Microsoft product shopping spree for one of my websites! I bought a bunch of those funky curved keyboards and sold them all, pocketing the cash. Oh, the glory days.

After high school I served a mission for my church for two years (2000-2002), full-time. I consider them the most valuable years of my life. During that time I didn’t have access to a computer. When I returned home, knowing colspan and rowspan wasn’t enough. So I dropped web development all together and graduated from BYU-Idaho in Economics.

Somehow, I got back in to web development and everything started to click. I really don’t know how it happened exactly. I’ve spent the last few years consulting but recently took up a full-time gig. I work from home in Salt Lake City, UT as a Senior Technical Consultant for the awesome digital agency Clock Four out of San Francisco.

Outside of work I spend my time playing with my kids, helping my wife with her photography business, ignoring my miserable lawn, and wishing I was still cool and in a punk rock band instead of getting fat sitting at my MacBook Pro hacking. At least I make a little more than $7.50/hr these days.