A note before the actual post: a week ago, while proofreading I’ve noticed that some of the following statements, which are meant truly neutral, could and would leave a stale aftertaste. That’s definitely not the intention; it’s more a snapshot of the current state (like for a chronicle). On the other hand: if I would censor it more, I can trash as well the whole post. Because ten thousands of texts were already written about the curent state of human society and the impact of Covid-19.
So, read it with a pinch of salt: we are lucky to be healthy and that we don’t suffer from more harsh conditions.
More than two months ago Sars-CoV-2 -induced infections scaled up in Germany and hit us without much preparation. Us includes me, my family, my workplace, society at all.
The imposed lockdown led to the problem that my wife is most of the time taking care of our daughter in toddler-age, because the pre-kindergarten was closed (and is now bankrupt ..) and because all of her educational courses were cancelled. This affects my educational-plans with Mandarin (which I continued in 2020) as well (so, goodbye to the HSK1-exam for the next months).
Also the situation at my workplace changed: we are now allowed to work from home (called remote office), which was not possible before. Core-working hours are not enforced anymore, so it is possible to work from 06:00 to 24:00. But due to team-synchonization, most prefer the regular working hours. Most of the times I still drive to work, because of the given setup there; and since sometimes access to special devices is needed, which can’t be borrowed away.
For remote office, the needed adaptations to my private LAN were easily done and I set-up with some spare periphery and the laptop a workplace. So I can work from home via double-layered RDP-access. But when you are creating a release of our software, interaction and feedback with lots of people (product owners, stakeholders, testers) is necessary. So, some processes were adapted. For communication first TeamViewer, then Rainbow was introduced.
But that was just covering my workplace: the bigger issue is that everything which was arranged and booked, is cancelled: I planned to acquire the ISAQB-certification to make the trio complete (with IREB & ISTQB). And, if this is possible later in the year, I want to attend a real seminar instead of one of thoise online-seminars.
This stems also from the experience of the shift for conferences from “real, in person” to “online”. I attended several from the MUCplusplus-group (about C++, of course) and some about project-management and also Python. (Funny note: we had Zoom, Twitch, Youtube Live, GoToMeeting .. hey, I guess the next one will bring another platform ..) Some were nice, most of them informative (like usual), but the real experience was missing. The spirit, the atmosphere. You just sit or stand by yourself, you watch the mono- or dialogue, you can enter some comments via the chat-window, but most of the time the conversation is one-direction. And this is not what I felt and experienced in those other conferences in the time “before”.
Next: my own ‘private’ programming and tinkering;the contributions to projects (and github) are close to zero: no words needed, the graph shows the gap. I am currently catching up, we as family have also arranged a different set-up at home. It is still a challenge, but we accept and tackle it well. (Only those who change stay true to themselves ..)
So, as laid out: Covid-19 has and had a quite severe impact on my and our life. But we still strife for more. Especially that hiatus of the learning-journey is already adressed. Therefore we adapt and overcome 🙂