What's been up?
You may have noticed that this blog has been rather quiet recently. Don't worry, I've noticed too. This has primarily been due a perfect storm of events, which I'll skim over throughout this post.
- My one-year old learning to walk and generally causing chaos.
- An effort reducing the amount of "screen time" when I get off of work, and doing things like reading more.
- Generally, blogging is prioritized after that of answering questions on the ASP.NET Forums, Stack Overflow and other community engagements.
- Additionally, I became locked out of my Ghost account and was unable to reset my password. So there's that.
if(parent.HasChild) { life.Difficulty++; }
In May of last year, my wife and I had our first child. He has been absolutely wonderful and embodies all of the great things that people so often say about babies. While the past year has seemed to fly by, it's been filled with milestones, both good and bad, and it has really given me more perspective on balancing work and life.
Note to Future Parents: Daycare should be referred to as PDaaS, or Petri Dish as a Service. Daycare in a nutshell is a service that allows you to pay exorbitant amounts of money in exchange for missing work because your child is crazy sick, constantly.
Reducing Screen Time, Increasing Everything-else Time.
Earlier this year, while trying to balance an often sick child (see daycare comment above), I decided to try and focus on eliminating some of the time that I was spending in the evenings looking at a screen. TV, Phone, Tablet, Computer, any of it.
To aid in this, I began doing quite a few new things besides spending time with my wife and my one-year old :
- Reading - Just finished a cover-to-cover re-read of Steve McConnell's Code Complete; Working on Jordan Ellenberg's How To Not Be Wrong currently.
- Cooking and Gardening - I love to cook, so I decided to start a small herb garden and if I keep it alive, my wife will let me upgrade to a big-boy one. (If you know my history with plants, that's a huge if).
- Listening to Podcasts - I've been wanting to get into podcasts for awhile a figured this would be a good time to do so. Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, and .NET Rocks are a few.
Overall, I believe this move was a smart one. I've felt more productive when actually tackling technical problems, more effective at writing code, and have slept better (as better as one can sleep with a baby).
Blogging Takes a Backseat
While I do enjoy writing things on this blog, it takes time.
Time, as many of these previous bullets might indicate, is a scarce resource and I rarely have an hour or however long it might take to churn out a blog post.
Most of my community contributions have revolved around answering questions on the ASP.NET Forums and Stack Overflow. I've tried to strike a balance between the two sites. The former for more open-ended questions, discussions and advice and the later for actually answering questions (and trying to be throughout about it).
These types of activities and working on open-source projects like Glyphfriend typically have that instant gratification feel, which is probably one of the reasons that I do those more than blog.
I Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost
If you remember from the start of this post, I have been locked out of my own blog. This can make it really damn hard to actually write blog posts.
As with most developers, I have alot of different passwords and occasionally, I forget or mistype them. A few times. Then I figure, "Hell, I'll just reset my password. That'll be easy", only to discover that I never actually configured a mail service with-in Ghost to do so.
So this whole process sent me down a rabbit hole on updating Ghost on Azure, querying the existing Ghost.db files, upgrading Node, discovering Kudu, and all sorts of other madness. But that's another discussion for another blog-post.
But as you can see, things are roughly back to normal for now.