Stuff that happened

In April the NHL playoffs started and my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs faced the Boston Bruins once again. The playoffs are always a great source of excitement and anxiety for me, especially in neck-to-neck matchups like the one between the Leafs and the Bruins.

I caught the last two games of the series during my week in New York City. I followed game seven on my phone during my girlfriend’s birthday dinner and was absolutely heartbroken when I saw that they lost to the Bruins yet again. This is the third time that this has happened in recent years (2013, 2018, and now 2019; all settled in games sevens).

This year’s loss stung more than usual. I was so sure that the Leafs would finally slay their demon as they had the series lead on numerous occasions. All they had to do was win one more game and they would have made it to the second round of the playoffs for the first time since the early 2000s. Just one more win…

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The New York City trip wasn’t all bad though; hanging out with Kylea and our friends Antonella and Ariel was super fun. On one of the nights, we went to a comedy show at The Village Underground hosted by Dan Soder. There were six comedians that performed that night and they were all really good. Michelle Wolf was supposed to be a surprise guest but sadly her flight was delayed.

We ate a lot of good food in New York City, including:

• Roberta’s for tasty wood-fired pizza. They also had a Tiki bar with nice cocktails.
• Ippudo for incredible ramen. It was 100% worth the 1-hour wait.
• Spicy Village for unreal Chinese food. This place was a surprise hit for me as Kylea and I stumbled across it randomly. It turned out to be the best meal we had in New York City. The price was insane too; we paid $35 for both of us and for a lot of food!

Near the end of the trip I attended the React Training workshop to learn about the new hooks API.

Michael and Ryan were fantastic teachers and I got a good grasp of what hooks are and why they are useful. I now understand why React developers are so excited about it. I’m planning on doing a separate blog post to explain what hooks are. As they say, the best way to learn something is to try and teach it.

Shoutouts to Shopify for sending me on this workshop 😍

Stuff I worked on

In April I finally stopped playing Dead Cells so I spent time getting my feet wet with Gatsby. Gatsby is a framework that spits out fast static websites. Like, insanely fast. Check out some of the sites on the showcase page to see how blazingly snappy Gatsby-generated sites are.

What’s cool about Gatsby is that you have a lot of flexibility with where you pull your content from, including WordPress, Contentful, Shopify, and more. I decided to try my hand at making a Gatsby site using this WordPress blog as the source of content. Thanks to the gatsby-source-wordpress and Gatsby’s excellent documentation, I was able to do just that. I haven’t really worked on the styling and there are still some kinks to iron out, but you can check out the demo here.

It was a nice way to learn about Gatsby and practice my React and GraphQL chops. I’m going to be writing a separate post about the process, roadblocks, and gotchas.

What I read

This month I read half of The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It was way longer than I thought so I’m going to have to talk about it in my next post. Thus far it’s been an eye-opening read, and I’ve learned a lot how much of what we eat today is derived from corn. More on this book next month!