The long road to recovery

If you didn't read my post from yesterday, I had a bit of a mishap at work. I caught my leg in between a golf cart and a pole and broke my leg in 2 places. Yesterday, I was in a state of shock for the majority of the day. I never registered what had happened, even when it was happening. I actually didn't even realize I had caught my leg like that until I looked down to see it stuck. I literally tried to walk it off. I immediately knew it was broken, as I've suffered from broken bones before and it has a distinct feeling. It swelled up to twice the size almost instantaneously. Today, reality hit me like a ton of bricks. This isn't going to be something where I'm able to get back to work in a couple weeks, I'm going to need to have my foot propped up at the very least. If I end up having surgery, which is a strong likelihood, my recovery could be much longer, including the dreaded physical therapy. I had surgery for some broken bones in my knee about 7 years ago, and it was excruciating afterwards. The recovery for that injury was about 4 months, so I'm hoping this is nothing like that. On the bright side, I'm still getting paid and I can really put some effort into coding unimpeded by the 9-5.

I took full advantage of this today and last night. I've been working hard on my portfolio this whole week, and it finally came together this morning. While there is still a lot of work left to do in the project, I got to the point where I felt comfortable deploying it and showing it to the world. My first try at deployment was a failure, as it usually is. I tried to deploy it on Netlify, and everything seemed to work until I navigated to an external link and then tried to go back; the app broke. I've had this happen before with Netlify and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the routing, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it this time. So, I tried another deployment agency, Zeit's Now. I have used Now in the past, but only for a couple of projects. It seems to be as convenient as Netlify, if not more so. They have a really nice CLI to help with deployment and I was able to get it fully deployed within 10 minutes. I had no issues with navigating away from the page and coming back; everything seems to be working very well.

I decided to post my portfolio for scrutiny on both Twitter and LinkedIn, and got both some positive feedback and some criticism. I took the criticism and tried to implement the changes they thought would help the appearance of the app, and it turns out that, for the most part, I liked the changes I was suggested to implement. I added some of my more notable projects to the homepage, fixed an issue with the Navbar, and actually changed up the homepage considerably. It actually does look a lot better and makes sense to have access to some projects without having to click to another screen. It was suggested that I limit my projects to no more than 6, but I think the way I have it organized looks fine, and it shows how much effort I've put into this journey by including all of my post-worthy projects instead of just a few. As far as the positive responses, I expect nothing less from this warm and welcoming community. Ever since I started posting to Twitter through #100DaysOfCode, I've received so much encouragement that it's often overwhelming. Now that I have more time to focus on development, I'm going to be posting a lot more to other members of the community's tweets to give back what I've been given. I'm so impressed by this group of people; there aren't a lot of industries like this beautiful development community.

Until tomorrow!