Mat Ryer has been programming computers since he was 6 years old; he and his father would build games and programs, first in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum and then in AmigaBASIC and AMOS on Commodore Amiga. Many hours were spent on manually copying the code from Amiga Format magazine and tweaking variables or moving GOTO statements around to see what might happen. The same spirit of exploration and obsession with programming led Mat to start work with a local agency in Mansfield, England, when he was 18, where he started to build websites and services.
In 2006, Mat left rural Nottinghamshire for London, where he took a job at BT. It was here that he worked with a talented group of developers and managers on honing his agile development skills and developing the light flavor that he still uses today.
After being contracted around London for a few years, coding everything from C# and Objective-C to Ruby and JavaScript, Mat noticed a new systems language called Go that Google was pioneering. Since it addressed very pertinent and relevant modern technical challenges, Mat started using it to solve problems while the language was still in the beta stage and he has used it ever since.
In 2012, Mat moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he worked on a variety of projects, from big data web services and highly available systems to small side projects and charitable endeavors. He returned home, to London, in 2015 after the company he was working in was sold. Mat, to this day, continues to use Go to build a variety of products, services, and open-source projects. He writes articles about Go on his blog at matryer.com and tweets about Go with the handle @matryer.
Mat is a regular speaker at Go conferences around the world and encourages people to come up and introduce themselves if their paths ever cross.