Inside IT
Ryan has always had a passion for IT starting all the way back in secondary school.
Once Ryan got into IT as a career at the tail end of 2012, he began to see the value in process automation, initially business process automation built upon SharePoint Lists & Workflows. Throughout 2013 & 2014 he started learning PowerShell to automate a repetitive IT Support task with SharePoint and has not looked back since, with PowerShell being the core language of choice for him due to it’s flexibility and more importantly just how accessible & non-cryptic a language it can be.
Since 2015 Ryan has presented at a number of user groups and conferences which you can read up on the Where I’ve Presented page. You can also see where he may be on the Find me at page.
In 2015 after attending PSConfAsia, Ryan revived the UK PowerSell User Groups which with help of other community leaders all across the UK this has grown to include Manchester, London, Yorkshire, Birmingham, Cardiff, Sounthampton, Nottingham & Scotland under the UK DevOps Collective brand since then.
In 2016, Ryan was awarded the Microsoft Most Valued Professional Award for Cloud and Datacenter Management and you could have viewied his MVP Profile to find out more as he has been awarded every year since then. However In August 2022, he was removed from the program, still to this day finding it unclear as to why that was, as he never got a real answer to his questioning of what led him to lose this award. He thinks he knows what happened, but like any adult would like to be given the reasoning as to why this happened.
Ryan has also been involved in organising a number of conferences including PSDayUK, the UK PowerShell Conference, PSConfEu in 2016 & PSConfAsia & even helped organise and run in 2020 during the height of the Pandemnic a 24 hour virtual conference in 2020 and helped manage the calendar for the PowerScripting Podcast
Through all this interaction Ryan has been able to see first-hand just how useful and powerful PowerShell can be and this allows him to bring this experience to wider audiences through training, mentoring and involvement in the community Slack/Discord
Ryan has also run the LeedsAzure User Group which he set up just before the Covid-19 Pandemic hit, and this has now been Yorkshire Azure User Group, now that he no longer lives near enough to be able to effectively run it, nor has the time to dedicate to it either.
Outside IT
Ryan has a keen interest in all sorts of music, but mainly focusing on Metal, Rock, Indie, Drum & Bass, House, Techno & Psytrance to name a few genres. Ryan has year on year listened to well over 130k minutes of music via Spotify and when he can will attend gigs and festivals.
Ryan also has a very keen interest in all manners of areas of Science particularly around Neuroscience, Psychology/Mental Health (which he blogs about more over on Mhasl.me - Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me) & various branches of Chemistry.
Try not to get Ryan started on either Law or Politics, unless you want a very long, but interesting, conversation on either topic.
Ryan has also been a Volunteer Vaccinator with St John Ambulance since February 2021. Ryan is trained to deliver doses of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines as well as flu vaccines. Ryan has volunteered his time regularly over Saturday and Sunday mornings in addition to his day job and has delivered well over 500 vaccinations to those getting 1st, 2nd or Booster doses. Ryan was also accepted to join St John Ambulance as a First Aider, however this is something that he has been unable to progress with at this current time.