Hello there.

Welcome to my blog aptly named "My name is Dick Wyn".

Firstly, a little introduction about myself. My name is dickwyn, I was born and raised in Malaysia and am currently living in the United States. Some of my favorite pastimes include cooking (and also eating), taking photos and reading up on the latest and greatest in consumer technology. Fun fact, my favorite time of the year is December as it is to me a month of ongoing celebrations. You can learn a little bit more about me on my personal website at www.dickwyn.xyz.

Moving back to this new blog. This is the 4th version of my personal blog, previous versions being on Blogger and Wordpress respectively. This new blog has been a long time coming (about three years). There were a few small prototypes over the years with different platforms and I ended up settling with Gatsby + Netlify CMS. This transition meant that I was leaving my previous Wordpress site which I was using since 2013. I find it hard to believe that it's been nearly 7 years since I started that blog.

One of the main reasons why I wanted to move out of a wordpress.com blog was because of the cost. I put in $18 + tax each year just to map the blog.dickwyn.xyz domain to my wordpress blog. It also had ads in between my posts which I wasn't a big fan of. Adding to that, I only wrote like 5-7 posts a year when I was at college. Over time, I felt a disconnect with blogging due to multiple reasons. I'll leave that for a story for another day.

I was planning to write this first post back in September as I wanted to continue on where I left off from my wordpress blog. The last post from that blog was written on September of 2018. Due to several delays, some intentional and some due to technical faults on my end. There are still some loose bolts in the UI of the site. If you find anything that doesn't look right, please notify me. I'm well aware that by opting this route of self-hosting this blog, I am essentially signing myself up for some technical hurdles to jump on. The past few days, I spent a sizable amount of time cleaning up some elements in the blog interface. The journey of developing this blog from a technical point of view is still incomplete. I'm planning to use this blog as a test bed for some mini programming projects like performance optimization and progressive web applications.

Besides this blog being a side programming project of mine, from the editorial point of view, I want to revisit / bring back the practice of blogging back into my life. I fell in love with blogging during my early days because it was a medium for me to share my thoughts somewhere. People who know me personally know that I an introvert and a quiet person. In public scenarios or first encounters, I'm always shy and reluctant to talk to other. There are however some topics that spark my inner voice to speak out but that's about it.

The topics that I will be blogging in this new blog will be broad and uncanny. It will be based on my current (or past) interests. As of now, it'll be a mixture of personal thoughts, technology reviews, cooking adventures, travel, photography and coding. And at some point, I will also open the vault of draft blog posts I have accumulated over the years. I'm also thinking of getting back into making youtube videos at some point in the future. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, so that be it.

Here's a random image of a roasted chicken I made a few weeks back.