March 16, 2020

A Year Later, Working From Home

It has been a year since my last, and quite a bit has changed in my life. For all of my complaining about Facebook, I didn't manage to delete it or completely divorce myself from it. Within a month or two, I had re-installed Swipe for Android and started posting again. I try to limit myself to family related, humerous, and generally non-controvercial topics, but there are days where I slip up and inevitably participate or cause a ruckus. That custom client was never created, as I didn't have any real desire to put that much effort into it.

One outstanding change that happened was getting a new job, where I fulfilled the role of "Sr. DevOps Engineer" from April 2019 through January 2020. In February, I finally transitioned over into the Product group as a Full Stack Developer (unofficial title), writing in Groovy, Clojure, and ClojureScript! It has been a long journey, but completely worth it!

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention current affairs. The global pandemic COVID-19 has changed our lives in many ways, most immediately is our government's attempts to slow down infection rates by encouraging officials and businesses to refrain from "mass gatherings greater than 50 people". Those businesses that are capable have opted to allow workers to operate remotely, schools have shut down for a couple weeks, along with fitness centers, libraries, etc. Airlines have greatly reduced their flights and fleets, travel bans are in effect, music concerts have been canceled, and entire seasons of scholastic and professional sports has been halted.

The world is a quieter place. We're like a colony of ants heading underground before the storm. The goal of this social distancing is to "flatten the curve" of infections, allowing hospitals to and care facilities to treat the most severe pneumonia symptoms of COVID-19 with a relatively limited resource: respirators, which are used not only for pneumonia, but also surgeries and premature births. Doctors in Italy are making war-time choices about who lives and who dies primarly based on who gets access to a respirator. The hope is that health care professionals here in the US can avoid having to make those decisions. Let's hope it works.

Tags: misc