Welcome to the fall/autumn edition of ramblings.
COVID-19
Surprise, surprise COVID is still raging across the world and we are heading into flu season. To say this continues to be a stressor is a massive understatement. At some level, as people have gotten used to this new world and have started doing gatherings more it has gotten harder for them to understand that we still have to hold ourselves apart to make sure at-risk family members stay safe.
On the upside, we are hopefully getting closer and closer to better treatments and vaccines.
Remote Life
Working from home is going great and it seems like any of the rough bit have been worked out long ago, at least at our company. Microsoft Teams keeps getting better and better which has been a big help. For example, I can’t tell you how much I love not having to reset my virtual background at the start of every video interaction.
While office-related items seem to work well for me remotely I struggle on the user group/conference/community side of things. I would much rather watch a video of the content that join live. For me being remote means there is very little value in being forced to watch the content live. If you run a conference or a user group please make your content available after the fact if it is possible. I do wonder if I’m the only one who is struggling with this or it others are feeling the same way. I want to learn, but the thought of spending n hours watching videos isn’t what I’m looking to do, but taking that same content and letting me watch it over days or weeks I am interested in.
Blogging
DbUp and Web Template Studio have recently been keeping the tech side of the blog going. At this point I have pretty much run through all the content I had planned so I will be looking for new topics. I still haven’t covered anything .NET 5 related which at the release candidate point with the final version coming in November. The table rebuilds stuff for Sqlite migrations in Entity Framework Core 5 look amazing, for example. I’m also kicking around doing a post on converting a library from the old school project to the new SDK style and targeting .NET Standard 2.0.
Dealing with Stress
If you follow the books section of the site you will notice that the number of fiction books has increased dramatically this year. One of the reasons is it helps me deal with the stress of this year with some level of escape where the non-fiction stuff tends to focus me on the stress more as I look for ways to apply the lessons from the books. The amount of video games I play has increased as well. I know these are short term solutions to the new world order and as I better adjust over time I plan to move back to a more healthy mix. On the move positive side of dealing with stress, I have done much better at consistently exercising.
Wrapping Up
I hope you enjoyed this edition of my ramblings! See you back with another edition in a few months.