About the Author
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.
