Every now and then, I find myself tossing and turning in bed, unable to go to sleep. It doesn’t matter if I ate well, exercised, or worked hard in the day; it doesn’t even matter if I’ve been sleeping well in general. Some days are like that. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

There are a fair number of tried and tested methods to get yourself to go back to sleep which don’t always work. At least they don’t work reliably for me. Over the last week, I had another bout of poor sleep quality except this time I decided to do something about it. Following a brief discussion within my head, a consensus was reached: to not fight the sleeplessness but rather to embrace it and put that energy into active endeavors which could be more fruitful. The result? My very first VS Code extension and Firefox theme, all in a span of 3 days. Here’s how the story goes.

Recently, thanks to a certain someone, I have found myself using Discord much more frequently than ever before. Fun coincidence, I had applied for the deletion of my Discord account a day before I met said person… well, I guess the Discord gods had plans for me. As the days passed and my usage of Discord increased, I was invariably introduced to certain community efforts that attempt to make the default experience of Discord better. While I personally do not use any such mods since I find running unverified tweaks on my device to be a no-no, I definitely was curious enough to spend some time delving into what functionalities these tweaks could offer.

What followed was a dive down a wonderland replete with countless (okay, maybe not literally countless) plugins and themes, each making the Discord experience ever so slightly better. The plugins did not really catch my eye, me being a weak newbie user and them catering to pro users, but what did catch my eye was the theme collection. Of course it did. Shiny!

Most of the themes I liked were already present in VS Code, an app I use for a large part of my work day, but there was one theme which I couldn’t find an exact parallel for in VS Code. Building an extension for VS Code had always been something I had been interested in but never really had a reason to do since almost everything I have ever wanted out of the editor has already been implemented by someone else. It’s the same problem as Google Maps contributions, really. Seeing the lack of this color scheme was exciting; it gave me a reason to make something.

A couple hours of creating the theme to work with the languages I use the most, setting up Azure DevOps, figuring out how the Marketplace worked, and so on, and we were done. We? Of course, did you think I’d be doing this in the absence of my perpetually online Discord re-inducteee? It’s fun picking theme colors together! Feel free to check the result out, make contributions (or suggest issues that I can fix), and recommend to your friends :)

The next sleepless night led to a quick and easy Firefox theme. When I say quick, I mean 5 minutes quick. You can get the Hypnobuntu Theme for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Hopefully, we’re done with midnight pursuits for a while. I need sleep.

🥱💤