One of the most important things a tech company can do in the digital age is to remove the anonymity from your employees. We live in an age where you should almost certainly expect the person on the other end of your phone call to be outsourced, in another country, and generally is someone who is unhelpful and that you’ll never be able to speak to again if you lose the call. At Armor, we want to crush that assumption by introducing the passionate and knowledgeable individuals that comprise our team, that you’ll be working directly with if you choose to work with Armor Techs.

With that being said, I’d like to introduce myself: my name is Ryan Miranda and I’m the Lead User Interface/User Experience developer here at Armor Techs. In layman’s terms, I’m the guy who makes sure that the front-facing portions of your website are functional, visually appealing, and, overall, easy to use for you and your clients. I’m passionate about front-end development and have always strived to create video games with my skills. I’m also passionate about marketing, and more specifically, internet and social media marketing. From interacting with people, to playing the “algorithm-game” for more likes, followers, and views, I love working with these modern systems of marketing and technology.

If you can attribute any of these icons to a service, I probably do it.

I grew up in a small town in Northern Illinois, where most of my free time was spent tinkering with video game consoles, playing video games, and being a kid in a small town. From an early age, I was always fascinated with computers and convinced my parents to help me build a gaming computer in 2005, at the young age of 8 years old. From that point forward, code, games, and online communities were where I spent the majority of my time. I picked up MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and RuneScape early on and got lost in worlds that were (in my opinion) much cooler than our own.

I knew that I wanted to follow a career path that involved computers, and like many children in the same mindset, I instantly jumped at the idea of video game development. Unfortunately, with where I grew up, not a lot of other people were interested in tech like I was, so getting started down this path proved to be much more complicated than I had hoped.

My programming experience really took off when I got to high school and got a shiny new (to me) TI-84 graphing calculator. For those of you who aren’t aware, these calculators can be programmed in a pseudo-BASIC language called TI-Basic. This was my jam, and I built all sorts of programs for it from ones that solved mathematical equations, functions, and complex ideas, to things like choose-your-own-adventure games. This was something that I got so involved with that I eventually built a 40+ function program, with a user interface and menu, that helped a lot of my friends with their ACT/SAT prep courses.

Unfortunately, by the time I had looked into colleges and graduated high school, programming didn’t feel like a good route for me to go into anymore. I ended up enrolling at Northern Illinois University as an Actuarial Sciences major, with the intent of getting a good-paying job in the mathematics field (and actuaries were the highest paid job at the time). After only a year in this field, I decided to jump back into my passion and switched majors to Computer Science, with a minor in Business Administration.

Going through the years at NIU were awesome, and I got a lot of hands-on experience (although, not in the sectors I had hoped) and I graduated in May of 2017. Going to NIU allowed me to test the waters of tons of different programming languages used for everything from secure credit card processing to game development and basically everything in between. During my adventures at college, I met a friend who referred me to Armor Technologies – the local IT and Internet Marketing department looking for a new web developer.

This is one of the most accurate things I’ve ever seen about graduating college—and exactly how I felt.

Now, after just over two years working for Armor, I can proudly say that I’ve found something I’m passionate about, and even though I regret going to university for it, I’m relatively happy with where I am. Working for Armor, I’ve had the ability to try on many hats, including marketing, sales, front-end development, and even a bunch of back-end and server-side development. In having the opportunity to try many things in the industry, I think Armor has helped me to find my niche, my passion, and, in turn, my career.

The career path that NIU and Armor have helped to create for me includes one of customer service, passion, and a drive to innovate. My passions lean toward user experience and user interface development, internet marketing, and web application development, currently. I strive to create websites that are easy and engaging to use, that they work for the business as a marketing and sales tool, and that the functionality is exactly what the business requires, and I love working directly with our clients every step of the way.

Working at Armor isn’t the only thing I do (shocking, I know). In my free time, I enjoy spending time on outings with my significant other and our dog, as well as reading, gaming, and programming. I’m always itching to discover a new concept, find or come up with a new idea, and to implement it into my development environment at home. Most recently, I’ve been working on building a market-tracking software for the global exchange in the game RuneScape. I recently had the opportunity to acquire a Nintendo Switch, and have been playing Pokemon: Let’s Go Eevee as well. This game has been everything I expected and more—and is a definite must for Pokemon fans, or anyone who would like to experience or share the nostalgia of the original games remastered for 2018.

It was a pleasure getting to introduce myself to all of our readers, clientele, and anyone else who chose to read this post! I look forward to being able to work with each and every one of you to ensure that your internet presence and internet marketing are in tip-top shape, and that you are satisfied with every step of the process. I’d like to thank all of you for engaging with our content and working with us; you are the reasons that I get to continue to do what I love each and every day, and for that, I couldn’t be more grateful.