And...... we are back! Where have I been? Inside, in Seattle! It has been around 5 months since my last update on the site and a lot of things have changed since then. Here is an update.
Since my last blog here are just a few things that have happened:
- We ushered in a whole new year
- A global pandemic broke out and continues to impact us every day
- We had our largest Xamarin event of the year all online
- We all learned how to properly wash our hands
- Nintendo Dispatch broke 100 episodes!
- Everything was canceled.
- Animal Crossing New Horizons was released
- I started my Animal Crossing app
- I took an afternoon off and finally upgraded my blog to Ghost 3.0!... aka I can blog again!!
Heads up everyone! No stream today. Taking a small mental health break and taking the afternoon off to disconnect <3 Stay Safe, Stay Healthy, and I'll see you next week <3
— James Montemagno (@JamesMontemagno) April 24, 2020
What took so long?
It has been almost 3 years since I re-launched my website powered by ghost, and I could not be happier with my decisions. I don't self-host the site and let the lovely people at ghost take care of all the upgrading, hosting, redirects, and all that stuff for me. One thing I do however is have a custom theme that I customize on top of it. This usually isn't a big issue.... except for major upgrades. It took me a while to fully validate the large migration and get all of the crazy node.js, gulp, and other Javascript things up and running, but I finally did it. I have actually had it done for a month or so (when the migration was required), but there were more important things happening in the world. But, it is here! The site mostly looks the same to you, but under the hood it is all fresh, optimized, and has a bunch less ads!
What's next?
I will keep my normal Twitch streams up every single Friday at 2PM pacific and ideally expand my stream schedule to twice or more a week over the coming months. I have had a plethora of blog ideas in the last few months since I started building new apps, so expect a lot more technical blogs!
I also will be sharing some tips for working from home, as well as steps I have been taking during the pandemic to stay positive and keep going. Beyond that you know you can find me any time on GitHub, Twitter, Merge Conflict, and at all of those online events like Build and our Seattle user group (now gone digital).
Going forward
I know it has been a while, but I am back! I hope that everyone is staying safe, staying healthy, socially distancing, and washing your hands for 20 seconds. Talk soon.
*Social Distance Animal Crossing via Reggie
