Bio
Ryan F. Baker has an extensive career developing technology that makes people's lives more productive and enriched. He has been specifically dedicated to bringing innovation to the education and creative communities. At Dartmouth's Interactive Media Lab, he developed web infrastructure that supported the center's cutting-edge education software. In 2008, as the marketing director for historic record label Sugar Hill Records, he spearheaded technology and growth strategies to help musicians navigate through a turbulent industry. In 2014, Ryan followed up Bachelor's degrees in Music (Bates College) and Audio Engineering (Belmont University) with a Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley, where he developed an expertise in front-end and back-end web development and a passion for creating clean, effective user experiences. When not building things, Ryan is usually either playing banjo, going on a hike, hitting up a new restaurant, or catching a live concert.
Projects
Insprite
2014
Insprite was a community marketplace for experiential learning in the maker arts. It enabled aspiring makers and artisans to find mentors who inspire them, and to learn from them face-to-face. I was lead front-end developer, and was critically involved in UX design and growth strategy.
Katie Herzig - Artist Website
2008-current
Since 2008, I have built, designed, and maintained the professional artist website for Katie Herzig, an independent singer/songwriter. The site presents news updates, tour dates, merch store, and multimedia in a clean, minimalist design, while utilizing a custom PHP- and MySQL-based CMS.
Gusto
2014
Gusto is a search engine platform that matches people to brick-and-mortar stores that match their personal tastes and shopping preferences. I led the front-end programming and design efforts, assisted with back-end development, spearheaded scholarly research, and helped drive the product vision. (Final Master's project, UC Berkeley School of Information. Proof-of-concept.)
Phish Photos
2014
Phish Photos is a searchable photo library of user-contributed fan photos of the band Phish. This is built using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. (Project)
InConcert
Fall 2013
InConcert is a web platform for people who want to attend concerts and other events with groups of friends. This was a comprehensive product design project that encompassed problem identification and needs assessment, several phases of user observations and testing, and prototype generation. The final deliverable for InConcert was a functional prototype supporting several user scenarios, and was constructed using JustinMind software.
UFO-IO
Fall 2013
UFO-IO contains the largest, most comprehensive dataset of UFO sightings in existence, and lets users explores the data in a whole new context. This was my final project for the Information Organization Laboratory class at UC Berkeley School of Information.
BrunchBox
Fall 2013
I built BrunchBox as a first stab at using the d3.js visualization library. BrunchBox uses the Yelp API to display all the brunch restaurants located near the user, with simple visualizations for distance and Yelp rating.
Course (S)crap
Fall 2013
Course (S)crap resulted from a group project which attempted to cut through the 'metacrap' and present students at UC Berkeley's School of Information with a more contextual and informative experience with selecting and categorizing classes offered in the I School.
Mining Yelp Reviews to Detect Subcategories
Spring 2013
The problem that I explored in this project is whether or not it is possible to identify potential subcategories of existing categories by looking at the similarity of words found in Yelp reviews. I identified natural clusters by calculating Jaccard similarity of review word sets using mrjob (a Python package for running MapReduce), and then applying an agglomerative technique. In the end I demonstrated a solid proof of concept.
Sugar Hill Records Catalog
Fall 2012
Sugar Hill Records has a large catalog of over 400 titles from its 35-year history. I built a MySQL-based intranet module which allows staff members to quickly store and retrieve information on each title, stream its music, and maintain a rich descriptive infrastructure using a controlled vocabulary of tags and a similarity web among artists and albums.
Sugar Hill Records Tour Tracker
2008-2012
The Tour Tracker is a module in an intranet system that I conceived of and built at Sugar Hill Records, a prominent independent record label. Developed over the course of 5 years, it is implemented using PHP, MySQL, and Javascript, and serves a variety of critical marketing and business process functions at the label.