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.

Lucas de França became Dracula's first dedicated contributor, bringing design, front-end expertise, and illustration to the core team—a journey we first shared in the welcome interview.

He introduced many patterns you see on this site and helped define our collaborative workflow. His work on a community-friendly light mode led to Dracula Pro's Alucard release and the open-source Alucard launch.

Now Dracula works beautifully in daylight without losing its identity.