In January 2020, my wife was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Putting it mildly, we were caught completely off-guard. What was supposed to be a simple check-up and procedure, turned our world upside down. Stage IV cancer at 40 years old. She started chemo almost immediately. A couple of months later, the rest of the world shut down due to the COVID outbreak. We took a hit in many ways including financially. My wife was out of work, my pay was cut due to COVID, and medical bills were piling up. We were blessed beyond our imagination when family, friends, and the Laravel community stepped up and helped us raise the money to get through those very difficult first few months.

We started a blog for Kimberlyn at teamkimberlyn.com. She doesn't write a lot, but one of us writes an update anytime there are changes to her health, or we have new results to share. We will try to keep her site up-to-date, so check it out if you want to follow her progress.

I went from following every PR and issue in Laravel, as well as a few other repos, contributing to various open source projects, working on side projects, and continuously learning, to not looking at code for the better part of a year. 

Recently, I've started working on my side projects again and checking out issues and PRs. Hope to start back contributing to open source very soon.

Here, I hope to start writing down my thoughts more often, sharing what I'm learning, and how I'm progressing learning new tools. We'll see how that goes. I'll probably start with a 2021 version of my "How I work in Laravel" post. Things have changed drastically since the 2019 version.

Hope to write more soon -