Ris Adams

Ten years ago, I thought career success meant climbing the corporate ladder as fast as possible. More responsibility, bigger title, higher salary - rinse and repeat until retirement. Then life threw me a curveball that forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about professional fulfillment.

When my son was born with medical complexities that required constant attention, traditional career metrics suddenly felt hollow. Working 60-hour weeks for a promotion meant missing critical appointments. That corner office didn't matter if I couldn't be present for the people who needed me most.

That's when I learned the difference between career achievement and career success. Achievement is what others see on your LinkedIn profile. Success is how you feel when your head hits the pillow each night.

Sometimes the best way forward is to go back to your roots. After 24 years of web hosting adventures - from the wild west days of Geocities to premium shared hosting - I'm taking a step that feels both nostalgic and revolutionary: moving to GitHub Pages.

This isn't just a hosting migration. It's a return to the hands-on, build-it-yourself ethos that got me excited about the web in the first place. When I first started building websites in 1996, every line of HTML was intentional, every image was optimized by necessity, and understanding how things worked wasn't optional - it was survival.

Fast-forward to 2020, and I find myself craving that same level of control and understanding. GitHub Pages offers something rare in today's web landscape: simplicity without sacrifice, power without complexity.

If I could sit down with my 25-year-old self over coffee, I'd probably start with "relax, you're going to be okay." Then I'd spend the next three hours frantically trying to download two decades of hard-earned wisdom before the timeline paradox kicked in.

The truth is, past me wouldn't have listened to most of this advice anyway. Some lessons can only be learned through experience, bruised knees, and the occasional spectacular failure. But maybe - just maybe - a few of these insights would have saved me some unnecessary detours and sleepless nights.

This isn't a list of regrets. I'm genuinely grateful for the path I took, wrong turns and all. These are observations from the other side of decisions, relationships, and career moves that seemed monumentally important at the time but turned out to be just Tuesday in the grand scheme of things.

Three years into my first corporate job, I found myself in a bathroom stall at 2 PM, fighting back tears after yet another meeting where my ideas were dismissed without consideration. I'd spent months trying to adapt to the company culture, modifying my communication style, tempering my enthusiasm, and generally trying to become someone I thought they wanted me to be.

The irony wasn't lost on me: in trying so hard to fit in, I'd made myself completely ineffective. My authentic self - the one who asked challenging questions, pushed for better solutions, and occasionally got excited about elegant code - had been systematically edited out of existence.

That's when I learned one of the most important lessons of my career: you have the right to be yourself, especially in professional settings where the pressure to conform can be overwhelming.

They told me that my son was a gift to science. They told me that I should abort. They told me to donate his remains to the hospital for research so that some good could come from his condition.

Find your routine​

In a typical office, you are naturally forced into a routine. I need to wake up early, shower, and drive to the office in order to ensure that I am at my desk from "9-5".

Without a forced schedule a typical day can become much less regimented, and you can find yourself working odd–longer hours to overcompensate. That little voice in your head starts whispering, "Since you're saving commute time, shouldn't you be working more hours?" Ignore that voice. It's lying to you.

Surviving Remote Work​

I have been a developer for almost 20 years. During that time I've wandered through countless office environments—from sterile corporate skyscrapers to chaotic startup lofts. I've navigated cubicle labyrinths that would make Daedalus proud and fought for "hot-desks" like they were the last lifeboat on a sinking ship. But starting in December 2019, I began a new chapter—100% remote work. Not by choice, but by necessity. And sometimes, the most profound changes in our lives come from circumstances we never anticipated.

Every few years, life forces you to confront a fundamental question: what principles actually guide your decisions when everything else falls away?

For me, that moment came during a particularly challenging period when I was juggling a demanding tech career, a medically complex child, and the growing realization that the standard advice about success and happiness wasn't working for my actual life. The motivational quotes and productivity hacks felt hollow when faced with real complexity.

That's when I started distilling my approach to decision-making into something more fundamental - not rules imposed from outside, but principles that emerged from honest reflection about what actually mattered when the stakes were real.

These five tenets aren't revolutionary or unique. They're not meant to be. They're simply the operating system I've developed for navigating both professional challenges and personal growth, refined through years of testing against actual problems rather than hypothetical scenarios.

Where have I been lately​

It's been quite a while since my last update. I haven't stopped writing, and I haven't given up on the site (again). Life has a way of throwing curveballs, and I've had quite a few things going on—some too personal to share. But I want you to know that I plan on being more present moving forward.

How to Clear Your NuGet Caches​

NuGet caches downloaded packages to avoid lengthy update times. While this is generally helpful, it can sometimes lead to issues, especially when restoring packages in environments like CI servers. Below is a guide to clearing your NuGet caches to help debug and resolve restore problems.

Publishing a page is easy, but ensuring that you have quality content is not. How do you make sure that you balance your content so that it is easily consumable by your readers, as well as making your content easy to find by search engines? This guide will provide a few basic elements that you can review to make sure your articles have the highest possible impact and reach.

SEO is a common term for website administration and Digital Marketing which stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of organizing your site content, meta-data, and link relationships in order to reach higher ranked positions in a search result list. SEO is a basic strategy in any marketing plan and should be part of your standard practices.

You walk into Monday morning, grab your coffee, and stare at your repository. Three weeks of vacation bliss, but now you need to figure out what chaos your team unleashed while you were gone. Sound familiar?

There's nothing quite like that Monday morning dread when you realize you have zero clue what happened to your codebase. Maybe it was a sprint that went sideways, or perhaps someone decided to "refactor a few things" while you were out. Either way, you need answers fast.

You don't have to be a superhero​

Do you have what it takes to fight a dragon? Probably not, but that's okay. Most princesses these days are in very little need of rescue. Courage isn't something that you have. It is the choice to stand up and act on your beliefs.

How to Checkout a Branch at a Specific Date​

Sometimes, you need to grab a snapshot of your source repository as it existed at a specific point in time. This can be useful for debugging, historical analysis, or simply revisiting a previous state of your project. Here’s how you can do it.

How to Clear Your ASP.NET Cache​

When you compile a web application, the compiled code is stored in the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder. This folder is a subdirectory of the .NET framework installation directory. While this setup is efficient, it can sometimes lead to strange caching behavior, especially in the Console or WebAccess. If an IIS reset doesn’t resolve the issue, clearing the Temporary ASP.NET Files might just do the trick.