Ryan Irelan

I'm a development leader who helps teams successfully deliver complex and technical content projects.

Since 2003 I've worked with top brands on web development projects, authored tech books, delivered conference talks from San Francisco to Amsterdam, and taught internal teams at NASA, University of Chicago, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

I'm known for planning and delivering complex content projects on-time and within scope. Let's work together.

A Trusted Technical Partner

Every company should have the opportunity to make sound technical choices and decisions, even if they don't have full-time software development or technical staff. I've been a trusted technical partner for many companies, and I've helped them build their technical teams.

Frontier Co-op

I was retained by Frontier Co-op for my experience in successfully building and launching content websites. During the nearly 4 years we worked together, I:

  • helped bring their stalled, in-progress web re-development project to launch,
  • worked with their internal and external teams on ongoing updates and fixes,
  • guided their marketing team with strategic technical advice for new marketing initiatives,
  • mentored internal staff on best practices for modeling and producing successful content web projects.

During my tenure with Frontier, I was a trusted part of the team. We successfully launched several projects.

Modern Web Development for Content Websites

In addition to offering technical strategy and training, I'm a web developer who actively works in code every week. I've been working on a number of projects, and I'm always looking for new challenges to tackle.

I always use the best tool for the project. Recently, I've used:

  • Craft CMS for content
  • Craft Commerce and Stripe API for e-commerce
  • PHP for server-side code
  • Twig, Vue.js/Nuxt for front-end
  • Algolia for fast, accurate search

I've worked on third party tool integrations, like Stripe, Crisp, Drip, PayPal, Algolia, Google, and more.

Marler Clark

Marler Clark is a firm focused on helping people who were seriously ill from food. They are a long-time partner that rely on me to help guide their technical strategy for over 20 web properties.

We've worked on dozens of projects together, including:

  • re-platform projects, moving from a legacy content management system to a modern one
  • re-design projects, working with a design team to rethink the firm's online presence
  • a custom database of foodborne illness outbreak information using Craft CMS, GraphQL, and Vue.js,
  • a special intiative to help consumers in South Africa suffering from a Listeria outbreak

Technical Training & Education

Companies trust me to train their technical staff since 2006 using online videos, in-person classes, or via technical books. I've authored or co-authored two technical books with major distribution. I've also led classroom training ranging from a one-day class to level-up an experienced team to a multi-week training class for dozens of employees.

NASA Training

I taught in-person classes at NASA Johnson Space Center to train up core engineering team members on Git version control. My full-day class had the goal of helping teams transition from Subversion to Git.

After two successful classes, I was invited back to NASA to teach another class to an additional group of engineers.

The succesful training project with NASA resulted in:

  • Almost 50 NASA team members trained
  • A 90-page written manual on the most essential parts of Git version control.
  • Hopefully, some really cool stuff going to space (but, sadly, I'm unable to verify or confirm).

CraftQuest

CraftQuest is my online training community for Craft CMS. Thousands of developers learn with CraftQuest using our catalog of almost 800 videos.

Mijingo

I created Mijingo to deliver a la carte training on modern web development and content management systems. It was my first self-built foray into running an online training catalog.

Clients and Customers Include

NASA
CBC
UMB
University of Chicago
Frontier Co-op
Marler Clark
12 South
AMC Theaters
Ben & Jerry's
Black Pixel
FragranceX
Premier
Stanford University
Craft CMS
Workman Publishing