About

I am an opin­ion­ated (and occa­sion­ally bel­liger­ent) sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor who moved to Mass­a­chu­setts to work for a mid-sized engi­neer­ing soft­ware com­pany. It was a strate­gic deci­sion. I'm a strate­gic kind of guy. See?

Look how classy I am

Ryan McKern is a classy guy…

Born in upstate NY (not Westch­ester but also not Canada) and now liv­ing in Mid-eastern Mass­a­chu­setts (Not Boston but also not Athol), I design and build web infra­struc­ture solu­tions to with­stand a dig­ging, a fire­balling, or a slash­dot­ting (if those are still rel­e­vant?). One of my stacks even sur­vived a round on 4Chan's /b/ board once… but only once.

A short sum­mary of work his­tory and idio­syn­crasies follows.


Pre­vi­ous to my cur­rent role at an engi­neer­ing soft­ware com­pany, I also worked for a hard­core record label's mer­chan­dis­ing arm, a regional head­quar­ters for a small telecommunications/cable tele­vi­sion com­pany that you've prob­a­bly never heard of, a hand­ful of some­one else's failed dot-com star­tups, and a bak­ery. It's a safe state­ment to say that I miss the bakery.

While employed by the cable com­pany I ran an inde­pen­dent web host­ing busi­ness called Web­slum with my cohort Matt Miller. Then we turned cor­po­rate, mort­gaged our integrity for The Good Life™, and shut it down in the face of a con­sol­i­dat­ing and tumul­tuous mar­ket we couldn't afford to play ball in. As a side project I main­tain the infra­struc­ture for a web host­ing co-operative, where we spe­cial­ize in Word­Press and Dru­pal admin­is­tra­tive upkeep.

I have taken a solemn vow to never work another job which requires me to wear shoes, slacks, a col­lared shirt, or a tie. There will be no loafers, hush pup­pies, or patent leather any­thing in my pro­fes­sional future. My daily work attire shall con­sist of dirty jeans, dirty sneak­ers, a disheveled t-shirt and a zip-up hooded sweat­shirt, save only for laun­dry day when it may con­sist of a pull over hooded sweatshirt.

I prob­a­bly don't like your band. I am almost absolutely pos­i­tive that I don't like your friends.