Lyza Danger Gardner

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I enjoy making it easy for people to find out basic biographical constructs about me. Saves the wear and tear of actual interaction, plus it gives you something to read if you Google me.

Geography

A lot of people are extolling the virtues of Portland, Ore., these days, and the tech scene here is an interesting pastiche of cleverness and camaraderie. My perspective is a little bit different because I’ve lived here since I was born here, save for a short while in graduate school, during which I lived in Birmingham, UK.

Part of my absconding overseas was to prove to myself that my presence here wasn’t just torpor or provincial tendencies but indeed what I’d hoped it was: pleasure at living in one of the best cities on earth. I also have a fixation with the sere and spacious landscapes of the high desert, a love luckily shared with me by my favorite person, Mr. Pencil. We got in the middle of nowhere in the desert of central Oregon.

I enjoy travel above most other things, though, ironically, I am pathologically terrified of flying. I continue to look for ways to overcome this disability. Fortunately, I adore driving and long road trips. I have been to all 48 continental U.S. states, but also a couple of dozen countries–I once took the boat to Europe.

Education

There is an academic bent to my family and there has always been a Lot of Reading. One of my great joys in life is that people have recently begun to start calling me a polymath or an autodidact, payoff for an unmitigated obsession with learning and reading. Ironically, I am surely on the books somewhere in the state of Oregon as being a high school dropout. I got fed up with what I saw–immaturely or fairly, the jury is still out–when I was a sophomore in high school. I stopped going, instead spending time wandering around downtown Portland, prodding my nascent interest in photography and talking to strangers. I started attending Portland State University that fall and spent the next seven years there, graduating at a normal age with a BA in nothing particularly specific. I spent time in graduate school in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham but I do not as yet have an advanced degree, something that gives me no end of chagrin.

Careers

My core career path has always involved the Web, but I have also been paid for these things:

• Photography
• Wine writing
• Managing a candy store
• Copy editing
• Other writing

Diversions and Home Life

Pencilhaven

Mr. Pencil and I live in a neat tall and narrow Victorian house built in 1890 (ancient by west coast standards). He’s the nurturer in the family, helping to maintain our menagerie, which as of writing contains an African leopard tortoise named Chopper, a dog (Sydney), lots of unusual water creatures (urchins and invertebrates and marine fish), and a greenhouse full of orchids.

Our hobbies are ever-evolving, but I have a few consistent pastimes, including reading and letterpress printing. We also love food and wine, and one day plan on owning a vineyard. We brew and ferment. I take photographs–with actual film. We take a lot of road trips in Oregon, and a lot of driving on very remote roads.

Professionally

Co-founder, Vice President and Creative Technology Director, Cloud Four.

I like to take creativity and technology and glue them together into stuff that works, and works beautifully, on the Web.

I reject the notion that the builders of the Web spin around into two separate spheres: the elegant but finicky Designer versus the rigid but brilliant engineer. Nope. I’m resolved to be both because I love both, and I don’t embrace the philosophy that they need to be separated.
I see Web applications and Web spaces as whole entities, not a collection of database views, mockups or error prompts. I love beauty–I’m also a freelance photographer and writer–but I also love knowledge and logic and intuitive flow.

I don’t want to think of my corpus of ability as a collection of programming languages mastered or certifications garnered, but instead a treasury of conceptual experience and expertise. The notion that one goes into a career or a project with all the skills already in place seems absurd to me–the ongoing experience and joy for me is in figuring it out. If you give me something to create and I don’t know how–yet–I will figure it out.

I am, in short, a product of the Web. I am a mashup. I strive for the intuitive and the integrated. One day I might be a writer, the next a developer, but it’s all part of a whole, a technified continuum that has been my dream and my calling for more than a decade.

Find Me Elsewhere

Lyza Danger Gardner
Twitter: @lyzadanger
Flickr: lyzadanger
LibraryThing: lyzadanger
Facebook
LinkedIn
Etc.