Winter is Coming

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It is hard to believe it has been three months since my last post. After spending a significant time working on my boat, I actually got it on the water and used it quite a bit this year. The summer seemed to fly by, and for me, this was a pretty eventful summer. Besides getting my boat back on the water, my daughter had a baby girl and I became a new grandpa. I have mixed emotions about that because I still think of myself as young and vibrant, but it is also an amazing feeling to have a baby in the family again. As summer started coming to a close, I started dusting off projects I was working on in the spring. I am much more productive when the days are shorter, so I had planned on getting back to these projects, but then my son was hospitalized and diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. 

My son is in his 20's, so he is an adult, but he still lives at home with me, so his diagnoses hit me pretty hard emotionally. The reason I am in the career I am in is because I look at problems, break them down into manageable pieces and develop solutions. I do this with code, infrastructure design, relationships, and parenting. To be honest it doesn't work well with relationships for some reason. There seems to be some kind of quantum logic that dictates romance and standard algorithms don't seem to work. When it comes to my son, I want to help him fix this, but there is no fix, and this gave me a sense of helplessness that I really haven't felt before. 

When my son came home from the hospital, I worked with him on coming up with a meal plan, and I discussed nutrition with him explaining the difference between simple carbs and complex carbs. I also looked into what to do if he lost his medical insurance due to current politics, and how we could smuggle insulin from Canada. I was working the problem of today, two years from now, and five years from now all at once. My son made the comment, that he is now my new hobby, and he was absolutely right about that. When I take on a hobby, I research everything I can about it and learn all the details. So the minute I found out my son was sick, I went into full research mode and learned everything I could, and I am still learning. This is what I do. 

Unfortunately, no matter how much I learn about this disease, I am not going to come up with a cure, and the really frustrating thing is that if the medical community were to come up with a cure today, it would probably be too late for my son. By the time any cure would be released, his diabetes would have progressed so far that it couldn't be undone. The thing that I need to figure out is what I can do to support the community. Finding organizations that I can donate my time to is something I am looking at. I need to figure out where I am can make an impact using my skills.

When I started this post, I was just meaning to recap my distractions for the summer and go into the changes for the fall, but I ended up going on a bit of a tangent. Up until mid-summer, I had been working on several projects where I was working on getting up to speed on new versions of various frameworks. I had been doing a Udemy class on Angular 4 and Visual Studio code. In the class, the instructor showed an authentication method that I really liked and thought I would use in one of my side projects. I had been following along modifying the code for my use, and I had a pretty good working model that I could build on. 

Fast forward a couple of months, and I picked up the class where I left off. As I started following along and adding new features to my code, all of a sudden nothing was working anymore. All the new code was creating errors, and there was code in the examples, that I had no reference too. After banging my head against the wall for a couple of hours, I realized that the errors were version dependent. What had happened was that over the summer the instructor had updated the class to use Angular 6 instead of Angular 4. There were some breaking changes in the way HTTP requests are made and how the JSON data is mapped when it is returned, so all the code that I had written and really liked needs to be rewritten. 

I am going through the angular portions of the course again to get up to speed on the changes because I don't want to use an outdated framework on a project that is still in the beginning stages. I really love what I do, and it is exciting to always be learning new things, but there are times where things seem to change too quickly and it is really hard keeping up. 

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