Ryan C (crystaldawn)

I started out as a Linux Systems/Network administrator some 30+ years ago when Linux was a "What the heck kind of name is that" OS. It was absolutely terrible back then heh. But I liked that it was open source and I could fiddle with the innards of it myself.

That hobby later turned into a full time job as I began helping other people in the *nix world. Eventually it led to a full time position at New Media, a company which also learned that I could code with PHP and knew my way around MySQL very well. At the time there were not very many CMS platforms around and they were doing all custom CMS solutions which was an utter nightmare. I convinced the team to pick a single platform and go with that rather than re-invent the wheel for every single customer. I presented them with Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. I pushed for Drupal myself and then we voted on which platform to use. Drupal won 5-2-4, 5 for Drupal, 2 for Wordpress, 4 for Joomla. What a fun day at the office that was, and it forever changed the landscape of the office since the company is now one of the largest Drupal shops in the country.

After many years with the company, my parents health began to decline so I had no choice but to move back home to Maine and start all over again. I stayed on with them for 3 years and began my career as a remote person decades before Covid was a thing and remote work took over. So I ventured out on my own and began finding my own clients locally. I was an independent developer/sysadmin for hire, it was cool, but after a while I wanted/needed more stability as my family grew and thats where I'm at today.

When I am not working on code or playing with code as a hobby, I can be found hiking, camping, or boating. If you are ever in Maine, look me up and we can do some hiking or a tour of the state as I love meeting new friends and showing them new exciting places whether online or in the wild :D