The last month has been a roller coaster of emotions. After being hospitalized twice in September, the babies miraculously made it to 34 weeks gestational age. The Maternal Fetal Medicine specialists decided the risks of me staying pregnant exceeded the risks of the babying being born early by planned cesarean. At 34 weeks, our babies David and Jonathan were born at 3lb 14oz and 5lb 2oz, respectively. This, however, was the easy part. The following days were spent being wheel-chaired to the NICU, watching my babies struggle to breath and keep their heart rates up, listening to babies cry in the rooms around me while mine were silent floors away from me, and eventually leaving the hospital and leaving my babies behind. The boys have now been in the NICU 10 days. David, who struggled, in utero, is thriving. He is eating well, breathing well, and will likely be released in the next day or so. He is still under 4lbs and struggles with the hypotonia (low muscle tone) associated with D...

A wise man and pastor once told me that if you make a few big decisions in life all the little one become much easier. Robert and I decided before we were married and still young and naive, that our marriage would be founded on our Christian faith. Little did we know, this decision would change everything. Suddenly, children were no longer a financial or time burden, but a blessing and sacred charge gifted from God. We weren't just changing diapers, we were doing God's work! We became aware that the creation of life is an absolute miracle, and that most forms of birth control are potentially abortive (a fact that I think most women are completely unaware of because of the way birth control pills, IUDs and all other hormonal birth control methods are marketed). Adopting these beliefs, in additional to being gifted with exceptional fertility, we've been blessed with 5 awesome kids in the relatively short period of 8 years. It was earlier this year that we found out ...

Save your work and your BitLocker Recovery Key! Technology breaks.  Sometimes it is wear and tear, others may be power related, but more often than not I find it is human error.  This is why there are practices to backup work and software, and provide redundancy in servers, services, and storage.  Cloud automation has even made processes to recover from these failures possible in seconds rather than hours, days or worse.  One might think a 20+ year seasoned developer would always take protections.  Well this one, your author, became a little too comfortable and lazy. I worked long and late hours on a refactor and exploration of angular architectural design using SOLID principles - milestone 1 was very much a proof of concept and poorly written.  Uncertain of my direction and the incomplete state I left it in at 04:00 I decided not to muddy up my git branch.   ***Note , if you every find yourself thinking this way, slap yourself and yell...

usb type-c headaches and workarounds After successfully using a Blackweb BWA17HO002 usb-c to hdmi (adapter) to attach a BenQ RL2455HM (monitor) via hdmi alt mode to an HP 15-cb077cl running Windows 10 Pro (laptop) for months the monitor started returning a no hdmi signal message.  The monitor no longer showed in Device Manager.  Reconnecting the adapter, switching cables and switching monitors had no impact.  No relevant errors appeared in Event Viewer and no messages displayed in notifications when plugging and unplugging related components.  Power cycles made no difference.  Updating the BIOS made no difference.  The adapter was about to be declared dead when some magical combination of BIOS settings tinkers and a restarts suddenly brought it back to life. A week later the screen went dead while in use.  No errors, just gone, no signal, like the adapter had been unplugged.  After an exchange of coin Amazon shipped a brand new HooToo HC-UC...

It is time for a check in. I had just started down the road with an exploration of Xamarin Forms when I received a call by word of mouth to help a company with a small project. A few weeks later with a vacation in the middle I am back on track, only my tooling has gone through a few iterations. I explored react-native via Expo which deploys a shell to the app stores with the ability to update the JavaScript files on demand. This fits well with my agile approach to software development; however, Apple has started rejecting software that uses  this approach inappropriately . I have decided I would avoid the risks of Apple redrawing that line. I was also excited to stumble upon Firebase especially with their recent beta release of Cloud Firestore. Authentication, scalable NoSQL, file storage, and pretty much everything I need to get up and running the server-side of the project. There are also react-native plugins. Unfortunately, most of the services require Google P...

We came up with a roadmap to our first milestone for the “yet to be named” early reading assistant.  I spent the beginning of the week studying Xamarin Forms documentation which is a C# cross-platform mobile development toolset ( https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/ ).  I started here because of my limited experience with mobile development. The Enterprise Application Patterns eBook section at the end occupied the remainder of my week.  I studied the associated eShopOnContainers demo project at https://github.com/dotnet-architecture/eShopOnContainers .  Without too many challenges I could get their dev branch running with visual studio 2017, .Net Core 2, and a kindle fire on windows docker.  Microservices is the way to go for a growing company.  That said the entry point with azure containers is a little expensive for a startup with its first product. I am hoping the Microsoft BizSpark program ( https://bizspark.microsoft.com/ ) will...