Nice to meet you! 🖖
This is the official debut of the ryanphillips.dev blog! I think this is as good of an opportunity as any to formally introduce myself and share some of my experiences as a web developer these past couple of years. This is going to be a semi-professional/semi-casual blog, where my writings will generally reflect on me as a professional while also allowing for the sharing of my opinions, thoughts, and free-wheeling personality.
Disclaimer: Anything you see here was written by me, a human. My posts will never be written or edited by artificial intelligence, and AI has absolutely no part in my writing process. I think there is definitely a time and place where it is a useful tool, but some things should be left to us humans :).
Sharing what I know, learning as I go
I'll never pretend to be an expert in anything I have limited knowledge of, but I will try and share helpful tidbits I come across as I learn new things. Even in areas where I am highly knowledgeable, I can still make mistakes and will always attempt to correct myself if I say something incorrect. The fun thing about web development is that there's always an opportunity somewhere to become a beginner again, right?
A little about me
I was born and raised in middle Tennessee and currently live in Nashville. I've been writing code on and off as a hobbyist since around 2018 and have been dedicated to doing it consistently as a professional since 2022. I currently work as a Software Engineer in the Nashville metropolitan area and love what I do!
I really don't like to pin myself down as a frontend or backend developer, but people always ask, so for the record I'll say that frontend is my main specialty, and I sufficiently dabble in backend and infrastructure. In truth, I like to hack away at anything and everything when I am working on a project and don't really draw delineations across the stack when left to my own devices.
Currently, I do a lot of work in JavaScript/TypeScript and some Python, but am looking to add some lower level programming languages to my repertoire. That will mostly be for fun side projects, though, as I really do enjoy building for the web platform. Growing up with the internet as it evolved into what it is today, I've come to appreciate where we are currently with web standards and accessibility guidelines.
I love how simple it has become for anyone and everyone to post content to the web and make meaningful connections with people around the world, or launch their very own businesses that can change their family's lives for the better. I also find as the web gets better and better, my need to have any desktop app installed directly on my machine becomes less and less, and that's a win in my book.
Beyond the terminals and compilers, I also love playing guitar, cooking, traveling, and going on outdoor adventures. I'm a bit of a geology nerd as well, and most of my traveling bucket list revolves around rocks of some sort.
What I'm currently working on
The biggest projects taking up my free time right now are this website and my static site generator (Shodo) that I am using to build it. It really has become a much larger project than I ever anticipated! If I were more sensible I would have just used something like Hugo, 11ty, or Astro, but building my own has been so much more fun!
I knew next to nothing about static site generators before I started, so there have definitely been some growing pains and things I would do differently if starting from scratch. Nevertheless, I am happy with the little set of scripts I've been able to put together, and it's all open source if ever anyone else wants to try it out. It is still pre-release technically, but I'm now very close to pushing out the first stable version, and I don't have any plans on introducing breaking changes in the near future. As of now, it can currently do everything I want it to on the markdown side of things. Now I just need to catch up on adding some of the same features for JSON content and write a few more CLI functions, but I should make a separate blog post for that!
Stay tuned!
If you've made it this far down, thanks for reading the debut to this blog! I'm making this as a fun little side project for me to speak into the void about software-related things, but hopefully I will also write some useful and valuable posts in the near future. If you're interested in seeing future posts and are savvy with RSS readers, consider yourself formally invited to subscribe to my feed.