Ten Years

A new year, a new plan and a new direction, its been ten years since I started this thing and I have to be honest I loved everything about it. 2020 was crazy... I think were getting close in seeing an ending, but everyone's life has been affected by this. My work/home life has changed. My priorities have shifted, and because of that this website is going to go static for a while with an unknown date of return. It's time for change.

There is content from 2011 all the way to 2021 on this site. During those years you can tell my writing style has changed and the amount of posts I did throughout the years. The way I introduce topics, I start to get more personal instead of a tutorial style post, all of it a learning experience for me. My original goal for this site was to just to get better at my writing skills. To be able to explain something technical with words and try to keep it easy to understand, which is sometimes impossible with technology.

Over the years I have grown professionally with this site being the backbone of it, in 2011 I graduated college and was hired as a Network Engineer! My first "real" job into a career of opportunities which I took this site along the way. It's got some history in here!

This site was also something else for me, during these years my personal life has changed or maybe a better way to say it and being honest is this site was an escape for me, I was ignoring everything around me including questions I didn't want to answer about myself, and my life.

It worked for the most part all the way through 2019, I was sitting down on the grass during lunch with a close friend a couple summers ago, I knew this person for three years at the time, and still close friends to this day. Normally we talked about a lot of things in the past but this more, something was different. We talked for hours about life, goals, and relationships. This person opened up to me about the their life, their story, their struggles and it was tipping point for me. I realized right then I had choice to make, I could really open up to this friend like they did to me and tell them my story. Tell them who I am, they would be the first person to know this about me, Do I take that chance with someone? Should I just ignore it, change the subject and escape into some other topic? That spilt-multi-second decision changed my life and I'll always remember it.

In short, don't escape into something and not answer the hard questions you're ignoring. Be proud of who you are, be grateful to the friends, relationships and family that you have, and don't be afraid if you're going against the grain. That is what makes all the difference!

I'm planning on continuing to write probably on a different URL but feel free to follow [@lewiryan] or this site as one one day I'll post something about it! Thank you for reading this and using this site as a reference, it's truly been wonderful and life growing experience for me!

Update: It is official this site is now static! Over the past months I have been moving this site to its forever home and I got to say I'm impressed with the static website generator called Hugo! Although it has been a manual process and it's still ongoing there is going to content that is not been cleaned but I'm getting there and will put out another update! I am so grateful that I did this, Going over each these posts is a reflection for me and a reminder of posts I remember doing, others I don’t at all! Also, during this migration, I have changed some content and tweaked some posts by mostly added photos and a little grammar help along the way. So it's "technically" not static yet but the foundation is there!

This site will probably mean more to me than it does for you, but it’s been part of my life and I don't want to just dump it and forget about it. Read the first 10 years of my adult life, towards the end of the decade a more personal Ryan comes out...and like always I hope this is helpful!