It was a cold Saturday morning. I was at a conference in Germany and started to feel very sick. I could barely move, but I had to take a plane to speak at another conference in Spain. In the middle of the flight, I called the flight attendant and said I needed help. The airplane landed, and I left there in an ambulance.
I went to the hospital, took some blood tests, and started to feel better again. I thought it was just a food poisoning, and I was ready to leave that place. They got the results and took me straight to the emergency room. I was having an episode of Pancreatitis.
Two days later, I was still at the hospital. My blood results were pretty bad, they didn't allow me to leave, so I asked a co-worker to bring my laptop. At least with the internet, I could have a distraction.
One day I left my room to get some water. When I got back, my computer was stolen.
I was completely devastated. That computer was the only way I could communicate with my family in Brazil. How could someone steal from a person in a hospital bed? I couldn't believe that whole situation.
The next day, my co-workers tried to cheer me up and brought a new laptop for me. I had no backup to restore from, so I started to install everything back again. For every code editor, for every terminal app, I had to choose a different theme.
I always believed in the cost of context switching. I know how it feels when you're "in the zone", then suddenly, you get distracted and lose focus. It shouldn't be that way, so I decided to create my own color scheme, and my mission was to make it available everywhere.
My first commit was the ZSH theme. Then I moved to iTerm, Terminal.app, Sublime Text, and Textmate. At the end of the first day, I already had 5 themes. I tweeted about it and the community started to contribute.
Today Dracula is available everywhere and it's one of the most popular themes ever.
I stayed in that hospital bed for 3 weeks. I can't even describe the feeling of being sick in a foreign country, alone and away from your family.
Thanks Dracula, for distracting me when I needed the most.