The last 12 months

Published on 2021-11-10

Categories: update
Tags: tech home personal

Blog silent

I’ve been blog silent for almost a year now.

This blog post is my attempt to capture what I’ve been doing, currently doing and will be doing.

TLDR: most of the last 12 months spent working on my house, working on many client’s projects, coaching, and learning.

Personal

The last 3 years has been a bumpy road in my family. Covid and the restrictions that came with it did not make things simpler.

It made me realize how important my family is to me and that life is not a straight line, we need to adjust constantly.

We all had to adjust to being all together in the house, all day. Kids, wife and me.

Another adjustment, we started home schooling one of my kid mid year. I also started teaching one of my kid how to code.

We found new ways to have fun in family. We’re now enjoying every bit of somewhat normality.

Work and IT

work from home

I work in IT, and obviously worked from home since February 2020. At least I have a job.

The worst of all was during last winter, it was cold, dark, isolated and confined to a repurposed utility room in an office.

I work, and lead teams, meaning I’m often on the phone, helping, coaching. The whole family realized that too due to poor sound proof of the room. I tried many things, but this room is far from ideal.

Due to this reason, I setup a temporary office at my parents place (my old room), upgraded the internet. This actually worked quite well, bringing peace back in the house.

I’ve been adjusting to working remote full time now, and do not look back. I realized how much energy get lost in 15 hours of weekly commute. My employer has announced hybrid work even before Covid restrictions are dropped. They will leave it to the employees to decide if they want to come. They also downsized the office to a big extend already, so it’s there to stay.

what’s coming: sustainability, coaching and helping others

the IT world has been in unsustainable expansion in 2020-2021. So much demand, that “experienced” coders are less experienced than ever. Just recently, I got a proposal to move away from client projects, and help, coach less experienced coders using a mix of discussions, internal projects that brings value to the organization. This is not a “no tech” title, I code more than ever. This is still quite new, possibly more to come in future blog posts.

IT / community

I’ve meet a great team of different/like minded community built by David Wilson at System Crafters. Made me learn stuff, help others, and rediscover IRC. I also discovered awesome people like David, Kartinks, Acdw, Fade, AlphaPapa, TitanOfOld, and many more.

Home

As earlier introduced, a lot of my (free) time has been spent around the house, so what else can I do other than starting/finishing house projects I planned to do, but never had the time or energy to start or complete them.

Here is a list of projects I’ve done over the last 8 months:

1. sanding / refinishing oak floors
2. plastering, painting walls
3. new trims and baseboards
4. installed new doors
5. new tiles in the house entrance
6. pool deck
7. stairs and rails in the backyard exit
8. concrete repair

My next project is to build a small office, soundproofed obviously. Construction started last week.

Future posts?

here are some of the subjects I have plans for future blog posts:

1. Moving from IntelliJ to Emacs/LSP for java development
2. Various coding posts
3. Home Crafter’s version of: The Office
4. New posts around my evolving work setup
5. What ever else happens in my life that I want to talk about

For comments, use email or Mastodon

Don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed!