Justin Ryan

Justin Alan Ryan was born in San Antonio, TX, July 30, 1981. He began to learn about computers around 12 years old beginning with MS DOS and GW BASIC. During High School, he became the first dedicated e-mail support engineer for TurboLinux - originally Pacific HiTech. Additionally, Justin represented the company at trade shows and promoted the TurboCluster product - an early popularization of the "Linux Virtual Server" project for High Availability. At the time it was uncommon to leverage multiple machines in a cluster for anything but scientific computing, and this functionality was "proved" as working by changing the font color of the default Apache page. By this time, Justin had already been published in magazines such as "Linux Journal", and "Linux Magazine", as well as he and his friends' popular computing websites, which led to an opportunity to co-author a TurboLinux-focused variation of the best-selling "Linux for Dummies". This book was later used by a growing TL support team, as it contained some organizational wisdom not in the manual, in a conversational tone appropriate for customer support. Justin went on to become a career advocate of Free and Open-Source Software and has done remarkable work as both a full-time team member and a freelancer / consultant for organizations from five to five hundred people, and beyond, including Rackspace, PushToTest, Sun Microsystems, and the Association for Computing Machinery. Justin now lives in San Francisco, CA, the seat of Silicon Valley as a freelance engineer and serial entrepreneur.