Hi, I'm Ryan. I live and work in Chicago as a Front End Engineer. I'm always building side projects and write JavaScript-related tutorials that help folks build things, too.
- 👇Scroll to learn more - about me, software I've made, my technical writing and my skills/experience/technologies.
- 🖋️Read my blog posts and guest writing in popular publications
- 💻Check out some of my code on GitHub. I mostly use React, Node and supporting players
- 📃Download my resume
- 👋Connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn or shoot me an email at ryanjyost@gmail.com
About Me
Background
I started working at a financial advisory firm in Chicago right after graduating from the University of Michigan in 2015 with majors in Economics and German.
Not long after, I began to build a Wordpress site to share and discuss interesting articles, books and podcasts with my virtual book club. I became obsessed with customizing the design, implementing new functionality and simply building something from nothing.
Over the next year and a half, I spent my mornings, nights and weekends learning and coding as much as I could. I built a portfolio of fun and challenging projects to gain practical, technical experience. I also became a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional during that time.
I landed my first developer job in early 2018 at an IT company and have been loving it ever since.
Current Work
My typical work day involves a healthy dose of React programming, leveraging Redux and other supporting players in an Agile/Scrum environment. I'll also write some end-to-end tests, conduct code reviews and collaborate with our UX designer on new features.
Projects range from internal applications that manage hardware in datacenters around the world, to building out features in our portal for enterprise clients and tackling greenfield software in consultative relationships.
While not my usual responsibilities, I have also built a native tablet application, carried out architectural and build-pipeline improvements for our large React/Redux application and written some Node.js.
Outside the 9 to 5
A lot of my free time is spent building side projects, playing with new tech and participating in the community by writing tutorials and attending the occasional meetup. I really love software development, so work and play are often mixed.
I also enjoy movies, staying active, good podcasts, spending time with friends and going on at least one adventure a year. The most recent one was two weeks in Thailand, where I became a certified scuba diver, swam with a whale shark, washed muddy elephants and almost missed my flight home because of a nefarious cab driver...
Things I've written
Redux-Saga tutorial for beginners and dog lovers
Build a simple app that fetches dog images using React, Redux & Redux-Saga
How to take advantage of Local Storage in your React projects
And why you ought to.
How to build fully responsive React apps with nothing but inline styles and JavaScript
A tutorial for devs sick of chaotic stylesheets and media queries.
Things I've built
Movie Medium
A game integrated with Slack where you predict the Rotten Tomatoes scores of upcoming movies against coworkers.
DepChecker
Audit your project's NPM dependencies and export the report as a CSV file.
React Simple Storage
Simple component and helper functions for using web storage with React.
Newsbie
Navigate, analyze and understand the news media through aggregated, analyzed data. (May take a while to calculate on the sandbox server - worth the wait!)
The Daily Gray
A web application that offers a better way to consume political news and opinions.
News Sites Scraper
A Node.js program that screenshots and scrapes links from dozens of news sites. It uploads the images to a CDN and saves the scraped data and CDN response to a MongoDB database.
First Job Finance
Tools and checklists to help adults-in-progress stress less about their personal finances.