Donny Davis

The weather this past week has been so nice, but I’ll admit that I’m kind of enjoying the rainy day today.

Went out for a walk after being cooped up all week. The weather is beautiful today. Birds are chirping and flowers are blooming. So much beauty to take in today.

I was excited and ready to binge some Disney+ today only to be upset that it wasn’t working. Then I realized that today is the 23rd and it’s not officially available until tomorrow. 🤦‍♂️🙄

As someone that grew up without HD video, it’s hard for me to consider the decision by Apple, Netflix, and YouTube to only provide standard definition video as bad news. If providing only standard definition video helps with potential bandwidth issues then it’s a good thing. Would you like to have some video or no video at all?

I’m really excited that Disney+ is finally coming to Germany tomorrow. We’re already signed up and preordered and ready to start watching. I’m curious how much nostalgia will hit me once I start going through some of the classics. 😃

I have worked remote before and have the opportunity to, occasionally, work from home at my current job. However, being forced to work from home is something entirely new. After one week I already feel the isolation seeing in. Even with my family here it’s a weird feeling.

I want to give a big thank you to @manton and the rest of the micro.blog team for helping me the past couple of days to get my account configured. I managed to misconfigure something on the DNS side for my domain, but they helped me through it and everything is now running smoothly. 😃

Now that everything is properly configured on micro.blog there’s no excuse to start posting more. It’s really nice to own my own domain again and control my content. 🙂

I’m a bit excited that I finally talked myself into setting up a micro.blog site. I have been wanting to do this since January but keep putting it off. Since setting it up, I have been tying to think of something clever to have as my first post. However, I am not that clever so here are some lame words to fill the empty space for my first post. 😃

I sat down to write this on Father’s Day but obviously that didn’t happen. It felt like an appropriate time but I let myself become overwhelmed and afraid to put words down. Then July 2 came and went. That day is special to me as it marked 5 years since Shannon told me that we were having a baby.

I sometimes feel that it’s not ok for me to talk about certain things, such as emotions, because I am a guy. That’s just the environment I grew up in and have always accepted. My dad has tried to get me to open up before but it still felt awkward. However, I feel that it’s time to share some of the emotions that I go through in hopes that it can help others that may be dealing with the same things that I am.

Four years ago, on February 18, 2015 at 23:49 our little family of two became a family of three. We had our first child, a beautiful baby girl. Her name was Stella Rose. We had been so nervous and frightened worrying about how we were going to do the parenting thing that it never occurred to think about the aspect of not getting to do the parenting thing. At 23:49 on February 18 we had to learn an entirely new way of moving forward.

Our little girl was born in distress and taken to the NICU, neonatal intensive care unit. In an instant all of our joy and excitement was sucked out of the room. We would spend the next week on a roller coaster of emotions as we would get glimmers of hope, just to have sadness rush back in a few minutes later. Our little Stella fought for seven days, all under sedation to keep her calm. Before being sedated, I was able to feel her wrap her tiny fingers around mine and smile as she looked at me. She never made a sound or cried, which is a really hard thing because when I think of her there is only silence.

It has been four years now and I can still recall the majority of that week, even though most of it feels like a blur. It just takes a small trigger and I feel that I am right back there and every emotion and feeling that I was having comes rushing back over me like a wave. Even right now writing these words I am fighting back tears because I can hear all of the monitors beeping and see her laying there.

This is the point that I really wanted to make out of all of this. If you’re a dad and are going through a similar loss, then this is normal. It really sucks that this is the new normal for us but it is normal. You will have moments where it feels like you are being forced to move on and never talk about it, but I want to encourage you that it is ok to talk about it. In fact it’s necessary.

I have spent a lot of time holding in a lot of my emotions, but it only makes things worse. They will eventually bubble to the surface and explode out and you won’t be able to hold it in anymore. If you are ever in this situation and feel that you can’t talk to anyone, please feel free to email me and I will be more than happy to talk. I will not have all of the words, but just want to offer any support that I can.

This is going to be an ongoing struggle, just take it one day at a time. Share your story and don’t let your little one be forgotten. They are still part of your family and your story. If it was your only child and you haven’t had anymore, you are still a parent. Just a different kind of parent with a child in Heaven.

I want to share this verse, that was the verse of the day when Stella passed, as it brought me comfort and still brings me comfort.

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are protected.” ‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭18:10‬ ‭CSB‬‬

What is it about a blank page that is so intimidating? That little blinking cursor so taunting?

For as long as I can remember I have had this desire to write. I’ve never been good with words or grammar, but for some reason I have this urge to write them down and put my thoughts on paper, or digital canvas. However, whenever I think of writing, my stomach turns into knots and I feel some slight anxiety building up and I shy away from it.

Even writing this right now, I am fighting these urges to stop. It’s like my fingers are actively rebelling against me while I’m screaming at myself to stop. Regardless of this feeling, however, I am forcing myself to push through.

My family and I just visited the Anne Frank house, this was actually our second time there. This time there was a different feeling for me. The first time we went it was definitely very emotional and a little overwhelming. This second time I seemed to really focus in on her writing. It made me feel a bit ashamed that I had let these fears overpower me for so many years and miss writing down so many memories and thoughts. She was able to express so much under much worse circumstances than I can imaging, so certainly I should be able to stop worrying about what others will think if I put a comma in the wrong place or not at all.

I don’t really know how this will turn out or what it will look like but this is the start. I have posted a few posts before this but this is a kind of do-over to see where my writing will go from here. I have a lot I want to share about my faith and family, and being an iOS developer, maybe some nerdy tech stuff. The tech stuff may live on the tech blog at my job but I may still sprinkle some stuff here as well. This all may get transformed into some sort of family blog at some point also, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

The point for me today was to make myself write some ramblings down and get it out there regardless of how bad it is.

Until next time.

It’s hard to believe that this is it. Last week marked the end of my twelve week journey through The Iron Yard. I’ve spent the last three weeks heads down working on my final project and feel like I can finally come up for some air.

I’m not very good at coming up with ideas for apps, so when it came time to do just that for our final projects I was worried. What could I possibly do to show off what I’ve learned and be able to pull it off in three weeks? Every idea that I came up with just felt unoriginal. Then when I felt like I had a decent idea our instructor told us that he’d like us to have three ideas to present to the class and then narrow it down to one with their input. Somehow I managed to come up with two more ideas that weren’t quite original but had my own spin on them to make them mine.

The idea that I ended up going with happened to be my first idea for an app that would show yard sales that are near your location. This project would allow me to dig a little deeper into maps, store information remotely, and allow for integration with other devices. Currently the app runs on the iPhone and iPad but I have some ideas for a future release to integrate with the Apple Watch and possibly the Apple TV. I came up with a laundry list of features in the beginning and it started to feel overwhelming, but I pushed through. While I did not get all of the features that I wanted into the first version I got enough to demonstrate all of the base features for our presentation day.

It’s amazing how I went from being nervous and terrified that I wouldn’t be able to complete my final project to doing my happy dance whenever a feature came together. Starting with just an idea and ending up with a working app on your phone is such an awesome feeling. That’s why I love this stuff.

Seeing my own project come to life was awesome but it was just part of it. Watching everybody in my class bring their own ideas to life was just as amazing. I truly had a great class and feel blessed to have been a part of this with them. I learned a lot from them and hope that I was able to give back just as much to help them out. I can’t wait to see where we all end up after this and what amazing things that we will be apart of.

In our last couple of days of class our instructor asked us to write something to our week one self. I have thought about a lot about this and wasn’t really sure what I’d say until now. My best advice that I could give to my week one self would be that it’s gonna be one heck of a ride but that finale is totally worth it. You’re going to get discouraged and frustrated and nothing anybody says can change that. However, when you feel discouraged or frustrated, those are the times to raise your hand because you are not in this alone. Also, the most enjoyment you will get from figuring something out will be during your most frustrating and discouraging moments. Let those moments fuel your curiosity and desire to grow and learn. This is just the beginning.

Now on to the next great adventure. 

Well week 8 has come and gone and they lovingly referred to this week as agency week. The design class from the Austin campus shared some designs with us for a mobile app that they had worked on for us to bring it to life. My first thought when looking at the designs was that I could definitely knock out some of them but I wanted to pick one that would challenge what I had learned so far. And challenge me it did.

I picked a design that had some UI elements that I had not tacked yet and wanted to see what I could do. Having four days to complete the assignment was going to be tough but I was ready for it. I was ready until I started digging in. We had recently covered Firebase for a backend and I chose to go with that for this app so that I could learn a little more about it. Once I started to set up the data model for the app I realized that I may have bitten off more than I could chew.

Being more familiar with relation database models, Firebase was more of a challenge than I had anticipated. It was great for authentication and persisting the user data in the app but I struggled with the other pieces of the app trying to get it connected up. I ended up stressing over the database side of the app than I should have and didn’t leave myself that much time to knock out some of the features that I wanted to get to.

I was able to get some functionality going on a few of the screens, enough to show to our instructor, but I want to keep hacking at it to try and bring it to completion. I also want to thank the Austin class for supplying us with the designs. They were pretty fantastic.

Here are some screenshots of the app so far.

Since I didn’t get anything written down for weeks six and seven I decided to throw them together here. Both weeks had a strange feeling to me as it marked the halfway point through The Iron Yard program. It was surreal that it was already halfway and then when week seven rolled around I was wondering where week six went. It felt like a blur.

We continued our deep dive into Swift with enums, structs, calculated properties, and optionals oh my. At first I was just throwing question marks and exclamation marks around like they were Halloween candy. After a few more discussions I started to wrangle in my usage of optionals and it started to click why and when to use question marks over exclamation marks. I still goof up on forgetting to unpack the values at times and that always end with a slap on the forehead and a deep sigh.

Enums and structs are still a work in progress. Of course I think that’s pretty much true for everything I’m learning right now. The basics are pretty straightforward for defining and using them but there are some power features that I can see being handy down the road.

Calculated properties are something that are intriguing to me. Being able to set the value of other properties based on the value being set on one can be very useful. While the syntax for calculated properties isn’t that difficult to pick up it never fails that I end up plugging something in wrong. I’m pretty sure that this is due to me trying to jump in on something new and misusing it. That’s how we learn though right?

We are starting to think about final projects and I’ll be honest that I’m starting to sweat it a little bit. Mainly because I struggle with coming up with ideas. We’ll see how it turns out though.

Better late than never on getting a post in for week five. I can handle the intense learning schedule that we are on but for some reason putting my thoughts down on paper, or digital screen, is so much harder than coding.

In our first four weeks we dove into Objective-C and got a good foundation for iOS development. Objective-C was completely different than the development language that I previously used but it was good to get some hands on time with it. Especially since it is still widely used out in the world. Enough about Objective-C for now though as that’s not the focus of week five. This week we switched gears and started using Swift.

I had taken a look at Swift a little before class started, and our pre-work was done in Swift, so it wasn’t the first time that I had seen it. However, I must say it was the first time that I actually understood what I was looking at. While I was able to comprehend some things when looking at Swift on my own, there were some aspects that were beyond me at the time. Optionals anyone?

Despite having feelings like I was starting over, digging into Swift was really fun. Not to say that Objective-C wasn’t fun, it was just different. Things finally started to click later in the week as we worked through our assignments but my head was still spinning a bit trying to get used to the syntax differences and the different ways of accomplishing certain things. I definitely like the type safety aspect of Swift and am slowly warming up to optionals.

While there are still moments where I’m uncertain about what I’m doing it’s a pretty great feeling when things fall in place and you realize that you may actually know what you’re doing. I’m sure that I will be on this roller coaster of doubting myself and feeling excited for what we’ve accomplished many more times before this ride is over but it will definitely be worth it.

Here we are at the end of week four of our journey through The Iron Yard. I had intentions of writing about my journey thus far but writing intimidates me so I kept putting it off. Then our instructor mentioned this week that he wanted us to be writing about our experience and just like that my hopes of avoiding and putting off writing vanished in a brilliant flash of light. Well the flash of light may have been the lightening from the the thunderstorms rolling through at the moment but it was appropriately timed. So, without further adieu let’s get this thing rolling.

First, a little bit of backstory, cue the dreamy music and wavy lines to enter flashback mode. 2015 was a major turning point in my life and I found myself at a turning point in my career. After attempting to learn new programming languages on my own I started looking around for classes that I could take to help me over some of the hurdles I was having. This brought me around to The Iron Yard. The Iron Yard is a code school with campuses all across the country. After talking to some recruiters, friends, and family I took the plunge to enroll. This was very nerve racking for me at the thought of going back to school when I felt like I should have been able to learn on my own. With some encouragement from my amazing wife I was able to overcome that and jump right in.

I am not a visual designer or expert in typography so it only made sense for me to jump into the iOS engineering class. While I am still a bit nervous about the visual design aspect of mobile development I am glad that I chose this class. One part of programming that I love is the challenge and that reward when everything falls in place and you have a product that you made. This has been the most intense four weeks up to this point but it has been so rewarding. Each week builds on the previous and things just start to fall in place.

Even though it’s only been four weeks so far it feels like it’s been an eternity given the amount of material that we’ve covered. At the same time I can’t believe it’s already been four weeks. I came into this program with a little bit of knowledge about iOS development but no confidence that I could pick up and start an app from scratch and make it work. Now we are building apps everyday and I noticed this week that some muscle memory is starting to set in and I’m putting together some pieces without thinking about it.

There have definitely been some times where it’s felt overwhelming but our instructor, Jeff, has been pretty great at getting us through it. I also have some pretty awesome classmates that come together to help each other out and work through any issues we are having with the assignments. I am still struggling a bit with my confidence on some things but being able to talk things out with the class has been invaluable. We were told up front that it was going to be intense but it’s hard to comprehend that until you get into it. We’re not spending time in the shallow end. It’s the deep and learning to swim all the way. Our instructor shared this to demonstrate how the class was going to be.

This has been an exciting four weeks so far and only eight more weeks to go. Looking forward to continuing this journey and seeing what lies ahead on the other side.