Ryan Norbauer portrait sketch

I am an aspiring underachiever. I’ve worked for NASA, planned and conducted my own research at the CDC, and served as a foreign affairs analyst/speechwriter in the British Parliament; I founded, ran, and sold two separate software companies and one apparel company, and I have published peer-reviewed scholarship in leading journals across two separate academic disciplines. Other than the occasional unpredictable infusion of cash, lots of stress, and the ability to impress status-conscious morons with the preceding sentence, all that early-life ambition and hard work got me very little. I now spend my days focusing on creatively-satisfying industrial-design projects, creating high-end products for nationally-known brands and selling geeky luxury goods through my own "nerd atelier", Norbauer & Co.

I am pretty sure that claiming to be "offended" is just a lazy way to tell another person to shut up without having to prove that what he said is false.

I was trained as a scientist specializing in the rigorously empirical, dispassionate, and quantitative study of animal behavior, including that of humans.

I've lived in London, New York, France, and Boston. I now reside in Silicon Valley, California.

I speak English and French.

I code Ruby, C#, CSS/HTML, ASP.NET MVC, and PHP.

I am Founder and President Emeritus of Norbauer Inc, a global web software consulting firm, acquired by another firm in 2008. We were a team of over twenty software architects, engineers, and designers with offices in Boston, New York, and New Delhi. In my capacity as CEO, I was cited in Wired, Forbes, and many other venues. We built bespoke server software for clients ranging from Yale University, Microsoft, Harvard, and AMD to a wide variety of tech start-ups and international businesses.

I enjoy yoga, French phonetics, Star Trek (mostly TNG and VOY), Stoicism, fussy coffee and tea, world-weary pessimism,and protracted auto-didactic deep-dives on technical subjects (from digital photographic post-processing to high-end computer keyboard manufacturing to software language specs).

I frequently read books. I'm especially attached to the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Seneca, Michel Houellebecq, Kurt Vonnegut, HP Lovecraft, EM Cioran, Gene Roddenberry, Alain de Botton, Cyril Connolly, and Albert Camus.

I am founder of Lovetastic.com The first major online community for gay men to challenge the tired tropes of gay culture, providing a more aesthetically palatable (and less vapid) alternative to the various "scenes" that previously existed for gay men to meet and form friendships—or fall in love. Founded in 2004, our offices moved to Manhattan in 2005 when we obtained investor funding. During that time, we won laudatory national press from outlets like The San Francisco Chronicle, TechCrunch, and the Boston Globe. In 2010, Lovetastic was acquired by OKCupid (now Match.com).

I was born in West Virginia I'm actually in overalls, chawing on a reed of hay as I write this.

I am creator of RubyRags Maker of programmer apparel, acquired by the the Ruby on Rails design firm LittleLines in 2010.

I am pretty sure that everything is fairly easy. Most of what passes for intelligence is just persistence and a high tolerance for boredom (both of which may technically be the same thing).