Ryan Boyd is a Data, AuthNZ and Growth geek based in Boulder, Colorado. He has a 17+ year career in developer relations, developer experience and marketing. He’s a co-founder at MotherDuck, where he serves as VP of Developer Relations and Marketing.
Building DevRel at Databricks
Prior to MotherDuck, he took an awesome break after two years building and leading a team of developer experience engineers, developer advocates and program managers at Databricks. At Databricks, he focused the team on building an online community during the pandemic, helping to organize the content and experience for an online Data + AI Summit, establishing a regular cadence of video and blog content, launching the Databricks Beacons ambassador program, improving the time to an “aha” moment in the online trial and launching a University Alliance program to help professors teach the latest in data science, machine learning and data engineering.
Graph Databases at Neo4j
Prior to Databricks, Ryan built and led the Developer Relations team at Neo4j, with Developer Advocates, Developer Relations Engineers, a Curriculum Developer and a Community Programs Manager working together to grow awareness and adoption of graph databases, the Cypher query language, graph algorithms and more. Notably, he advocated for a better getting-started experience and built the Neo4j Sandbox as well as supporting his team building a better self-serve experience, free online training and certification. On the marketing side, he created new educational nurture and drip campaigns for the developer audience, resulting in better community engagement, higher click-throughs and lower unsubscribes. His team also built a new online community, first in Slack and later as custom forum. Ryan also established the Neo4j YouTube channel which now has 40k+ subscribers and the videos he produced have close to 1 million views.
Helped Build Google Developer Relations from 10 -> 250+
Ryan joined Google in 2006 as one of the first members of their Developer Relations organization. During his almost 8 years at Google, Ryan helped thousands of developers be successful with over 20 different APIs and developer products. He worked with marquis developers 1:1 as a Developer Advocate and also led highly-scalable activities such as documentation information architecture + writing, sample application development, library development, video production, and roadshows.
He was a key contributor on the team that launched many of the Google Apps (Workspace) products, including the Google Apps Marketplace and Google Drive. Some of his proudest moments in Developer Relations were seeing young companies join the Marketplace with new SaaS products, grow and become acquired, while attributing much of their success to collaboration with his team.
Working on Google APIs, Ryan saw first-hand how experience with authentication and authorization technologies impacted developer experience. He worked closely with the Google auth teams on AuthSub, ClientLogin, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect technologies to improve identity and authorization on the web. This passion led him to author Getting Started with OAuth 2.0, published by O’Reilly.
While at Google, Ryan helped build the broader Google Developer Relations team as a team leader, member of the hiring and promotion committees.
He culminated his career at Google by leading and managing a team of Developer Advocates, Developer Program Managers, Tech Writers, a Program Manager and a Community Manager working on the Google Cloud Platform.
Working in Higher-Ed
Prior to Google, Ryan built enterprise web applications, built web APIs and architected/administered UNIX/Linux systems for 6+ years at his alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).