Finishing Touches on the Blog

Two years ago today, my fiancé and I were in the middle of a full day of anticipation. On June 25th of 2018 at around 7 PM, my fiancé started going into contractions. Our daughter was already a few days off, so this was something we had been waiting on. As we progressed through the night, the contractions got closer and closer together, but never to the point where we were supposed to go in. We had been told if we got to the hospital and she wasn't far enough along, we would get turned away and told to come back later. Since the drive was about 25 minutes to get to the hospital, we wanted to avoid that at all costs. It was a long night with very little sleep, but we made it until the morning before we decided it was time to go in. That 25 minute drive to the hospital was the most nerve-wracking drive I've ever taken. We made it, though, and when we got checked in and they checked how far along she was, we realized we could have gone in a long time ago. I don't want to get into all of the medical details, but she was close. They rushed us up to a room and the labor began.

After giving it a go on her own, the pain became too unbearable, and she decided to get an epidural shot. This numbs the pain quite considerably and makes it a little more tolerable. She wanted to avoid this initially, but it was too much, understandably so. Once she got the shot, though, the whole process ground to a halt. She was making really good progress up until that point, but after the shot, it's more difficult to push, so things really slowed down. It wasn't until the late afternoon when we started to get a little nervous. The doctors were telling us that our daughter's heart rate was dropping whenever she was pushing, which meant the cord was likely wrapped around her neck. While this was incredible scary for us, I think it's fairly common. We tried for a little longer, but eventually the doctors decided it was time to perform a c-section. This scared the crap out of us, but I kept as level of a head as I could and they prepped her for the surgery. Thankfully, everything went fine, and my daughter was born around 9 PM that night. I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since that day, but it's all been worth it.

I'm coming up on a year of writing blog entries every single day, and I have to say, this has been a really good decision. It helps me to document my progress and talk out certain things that are going on, which helps me process my thoughts a little better. Hopefully, someone else will read this blog someday and use it as a roadmap to help them become a software developer, as well. When I started this blog, I had only been coding for about 2 months and was still working as a golf professional. I've gone from knowing very little at that point to still not knowing much but a lot more. My first version of this blog was written with Vue and Nuxt, using Storyblok as a CMS. I actually really liked that version, but I wanted to rewrite it about 7 or 8 months ago using Gatsby. My next version was a little better, but after looking at it every day, I've fallen out of love with the design. I've learned a lot about design in the past couple of months, and it just doesn't look good. Over the past week or so, I've been working on a style upgrade for it. For the most part, I've stripped out a lot of the styling and I'm breaking it down to a much simpler version. From what I've learned about design, less can often be more. This has been a tough and counterintuitive lesson to learn, but I think it worked. I will be rolling out this new version either today or tomorrow, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

Until tomorrow!