Mat Ryer has a family legend (or conspiracy) that tells of him programming computers from the age of 6—he and his father would build games and programs, first BASIC on a ZX Spectrum then later AmigaBASIC and AMOS on their Commodore Amiga. Many hours were spent manually copying out code from the Amiga Format magazine, before spending more still 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 for a local agency in Mansfield, England, when he was 18, where he started to build websites and services.

In 2006, Mat's wife, Laurie, took a job at the Science Museum in London, and so they both left rural Nottinghamshire for the big city, where Mat took a job at BT. It was here that he worked with a talented group of developers and managers on honing agile development skills and developing a light flavor that he still uses today.

After contracting 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. Because it addressed very pertinent and relevant modern technical challenges, Mat started using it to solve problems while the language was still in beta and he has used it ever since.

In 2012, Mat and Laurie left England to live in Boulder, Colorado, where Mat works on a variety of projects, from big data web services and highly available systems to small side projects and charitable endeavors.