☣ Code in a Time of Corona¶

Day 1 of the Apocolypse¶

🚽 Roll Count: 22 ✔

Today started pretty much like any other day. I got up, feed the ravenous horde 🧟. Then went on to clean our their litter trays before the house became ground zero and unable to sustain human life 😼.

But today is not like any other. Today is the first day of the apocolypse, aka my self imposed work from home initiative. But I have stocked up on the essentials (Fancy french cheese - d’Affinois don't you know, and no less than 3 Dairy Milk bunnies) and I brought home my mechanical keyboard so I should be set for the day.

Turns out the horde are not all that great at 'puting 😿. No sooner had I got my setup just right, mechanical keyboard and all. But one of the horde came to help. The smallest and most apocolyptically well named one: Beans. Now she thinks she knows everything, I don't know, perhaps she does? Anyway - she glides over the keyboard. Just the laptop one mind, not even the right one. And low and behold! "Your application is not responding: Wait/Close". sigh. So... neither of those options do anything and now the rest of the computer has frozen too. Time to reboot and I didn't even get a chance to start Toggl yet. Thanks Beans 😭

Ok, so 2 hours in I'm already feeling ansy. Time for a wander in the garden before my first meeting whilst my 5th cup of tea brews. At this rate I should probably start tracking how many tea bags I have left as well as toilet rolls?

Right - no more procrastination. Lets get this Tandem thing up and running. Hmmm... seems to be working correctly now. Weird. It didn't even ask for the Yubikey this time. Not sure why but so far so good. Joined a room just to listen to Simeon type on his keyboard. Sounds like home. Well, not home so much as a desk sitting opposite Simeon. Same vibe.

Notes for tomorrow: Remember to turn off the grill - a house that smells of burnt toast is not a productive house. 🍞 🔥

Day 2 - It's not my Birthday¶

🚽 Roll Count: 21 ✔

👐💦...

🎶 Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me... Oh for F-🤬 sake! I'm so fed up with that song now - Please don't be offended if I go postal at my next cake day, just duck and cover.

I miss cake day, and I haven't even missed one yet.

I'm gonna have to switch up the tunes.

🎶 I've got a song that will get on your nerves get on your nerves get on your nerves I've got a song that will get on your nerves get on you nerves all day!

meh, at least it is honest.

Even before the 'pocolypse I planned to work from home today. But whilst it was originally going to be a nice quiet day with Zen like focus, the current state of the world makes it considerably less pleasant because today, I have to...

😱 LEAVE
😱 THE
😱 HOUSE

One of the horde (Ed: 🐈 != 🧟 Jon (Jon: You didn't have to clean out their litter trays 3 times this morning Ed)) has had a icky eye on and off for a while and now has to go visit a specialist 👩‍⚕️. I'm not sure how I feel about this... I mean clearly the fur babies are more important than me, just ask my wife (I kid... or at least I think I do). On one hand I get to leave the house and see real hoomaans. On the other I may encounter the actual horde. I know they are out there somewhere. Stalking the good people of Australia (and Peter Dutton). The Covid 19. Not sure why they couldn't recruit just one more member to make it round 20. Seems a little half-arsed.

How are the roads still busy? Seems that the world is carrying on as normal. Did no one get the memo? The apocolypse is upon us people! Get off the road. Don't even get me started on the cyclists... 😐.

The clear highlight of the day is the obvious descent of my work collegues in madness. My favourite sign being the progressively more stretched puns using famous composers. I'd try to add another here but with all the excellent work so far its getting Wagner. Perhaps I should just Puccini a pin in it for now. Dear god that was bad... I'm soo sorry.

P.S. Sushi is fine 😸 and the horde are re-united - it's likely just a virus. And no not that one. Cats don't get that one despite what your uncle, twice removed re-shared on Fakebook. Oh sorry Facebook.

P.P.S No. It is not my birthday 😕

Day 3 - Am I a pro yet?¶

🚽 Roll Count: 21 ✔

Ok, I have to 'fess up. I've now done a bunch of conf calls 🤙 from home, and I will begrudgingly admit that Lomax/Melissa/Tony were right (Ed. Surely the weight of numbers in that list should have told you something Jon). Doing so with everyone on a separate connection is nicer that only some and everyone else being in a room together. I don't have the NBN at home yet so the extra bandwidth shouldn't cause an economic meltdown of the entire telecommunications industry.

This was really made apparent in the group backlog refinement (I prefer refinement to grooming - that has... connotations) I had today. Most of us where doing the remote thing. There were a couple in the office joining together. The meeting went on, as such things do - until one of those in the office made their apologies and left. It was at that point I realised that they had been so quiet the Google Hangouts has relegated them to the "and 1 other" section and I'd completely forgotten they were present. Bad Jon. Although in retrospect (that meeting was on Monday), it may simply be that I enjoy the sound of my own voice a little too much and simply forgot there was anyone else in the room with me.

It was also about this time that I made another stunning discovery. One that is more than a little disturbing 🤪. I like meetings now 😲. There I said it, almost out loud. Yesterday I was even told I could skip the rest of a meeting, but instead of immediately hanging up without further ado - I opted to stay with my mic off just to listen in. I kid you not! What on earth has happened to me?

My normal commute is over an hour - and I drink a lot of tea ☕. That stuff take time to get right. One does not simply 👌 dunk ones tea bag and voilà tea. And there is no one here beyond the horde (🐈 != 🧟) to talk to while I do - and let be honest they agree with me most of the time, especially when it comes to coding. I did teach them everything I know after all and they don't seem to be all that interested in self research. 🤷

Anywho, it seem to have a lot of time on my hands since moving (or not really) to working from home. I can start doing things during the week I wouldn't normally dream of. And on a completely unrelated note (honest) I now have more freshly baked bread 🥖 than Coles.

Clearly I have become a remote pro. 10,000 hours? Pah! Not me, more like 2.5 days. 🎤⬇

Stay safe Common people

Day 4 - Tugeda¶

🚽 Roll Count: 39 😲 (turns out we had more stashed away in another draw from out last WGAC order I didn't know were there)

Well, that was a wild ride. I know I admitted I may have a growing fondness for meetings now. But a 17 way conf call - wild. It actually worked pretty well. Well except when the odd plane ✈ flies over. Where are there off to anyway? Everyone has closed their borders and the idea of spending 2 weeks locked in a hotel room may seem appealing at first - but 2 weeks! I've only just survived the cabin fever after 4 days. And I have the horde to keep my company. I guess that the price you pay when you want to have a garden and a bit of space. You either live next to an airport (🙋) or rob a bank 💰.

Speaking of the horde. They've been bloody useless today. They have refused to join my conf call, slept all day or just disappeared. They are strictly house monsters 🧟 - they don't go out (well apart from Cupcake because she too old to be able to escape the back garden) - where do they hide. There are only so many cupboards they could have invaded.

Back to the whole meeting thing. This is the first Thursday since the apocolypse began. The first sacred CC day where we aren't all in the office. I normally love Thursdays - and no, it's not because I get a free breakfast. Ok, it's not just because I get a free breakfast. It is because Thursdays are when everything happens. When we are all together as individuals, as collectives and as a company. Well except for the OG remotes but I try not to think about them, they have snow and pretty mountains and possibly even toilet paper - gosh! So I love the holy Thursday bespite being more comfortable in less social situations normally. So I was a little down that this Thursday was going to be different. Our shared breaskfast 🥣 made me feel a lot better.

And it turns out me not heckling speakers at a Common Code learns was also alright. The stream was a little shakey to start with, but Gabe 🧙 somehow worked his magic ✨ even whilst he resided at home and it went pretty smoothly after that. Even without me there to opine. It was also nice to see Luciano is still on the NLTK war path after all these years since he first spoke about it at MelbDjango. I'd love to try to combining it (or Spacy which I think it built on top of NLTK) with AMABot at some point. Using it to parse some meaning out of human sentences without having to be quite a perscriptive about the structure of those sentences 🤔. But who am I kidding... that is just another personal project idea to add to the ever increasing list.

I did however start an experiment I've been meaning to do for a while today. There was an excellent discussion about testing, including fuzz testing in the #common-classrom channel - I'd read it if I was you. I say discussion, I think it may have turned into another classic(?) jmoss soliloquy. But one thing that did come up was side journey into mutation testing. Something I've kept meaning to try out. Luciano (that guy again 👍) suggest that I try it on EBIAC. Turns out mutmut (🐕🐕?) works out the box with pytest and EBIAC happens to have pretty good pytest coverage on the backend (or does it?). So I took it for a whirl. Man is it slooooow. After 3 hours and 10 minutes it got to about 1/4 of the way through. Which also happened to co-incide with the time at which VS Code updated, closed itself, killing the terminal in which I was run mutmut... noooooo!

Speaking of EBIAC, it is now officially https://tugeda.space. Tugeda being Solomon Islands pidgin for together. Which is coincidentally how I felt today - And for that, you have my thanks.

P.S. Serious talk - with the miraculous extra TP discovery, if anyone is in need, hit me up.

P.P.S I'm going to miss you Jack 😢

Day 5 - Productive as F-¶

It's FRIDAY! 📆 - I've managed a whole week or working from home without gooing completely cuckoo 🐦 - mostly. I also turns out that working from home is pretty efficient. I checked toggl this morning and it seems like I'm pretty close to hitting my targets for the week. The lack of a commute or too much context switching seems to be working out for me.

Turns out I'm not the only one. Plenty of stuff has taken leeps forward due to having to isolate oneself. Shakespeare write King Lear and the scottish play whilst in quarantine against the plague, and Sir Isaac Newton did some of his best work, early discoveries that led to calculus - which is apparently useful for something too. I also realise that Shakespeare was apparently an whiny pain during this time and I'm pretty sure Newton wasn't the nicest of chaps either. But putting aside that, and that they probably didn't have to deal with a child care, feeding themselves or even doing their own laundry it is interesting what a bout of (relative) isolation can bring into existance. Whether it is ideas to add to my endless backlog, or something of value like people actually looking out for their fellow humans 🤗. With stories like the one about 3D printing experts stepping in to help out with a lack of essential medical equiptment*. Isolation, and a crisis, often brings out the best in people. Not all people of course, you still get that one or two reprehensible people who will knock over the disabled or stab pensioners for toilet paper - or you know, threating to sue said 3D printing experts for patent infringement. Those people suck at being people. But it is worth reminding ourselves that they are very much the minority. They just have disproportionally louds voices because their actions illicit, justifiable, ire in others. They are news. The thousands of positive things that others do - go unnotice and un-broadcast. But positivity still exists, and is still ocurring all the time around us.

And look, I know this doesn't apply to everyone. I have the fortune of being able to just sit down and work. I don't have a million responsiblities. There is a reason the country is keeping the schools open for instance - keeping kids entertained and out of mischief is a full time job. And honestly, those who manage even a fraction of that are beating me hands down in the productivity race before even sitting down to read work emails. And honestly - today has, for unknown reasons, been super distracting and the spike I have been wokring on is beginning to feel like it might turn out to be the kind one places ones head on for display. :head-on-spike: ? No... missed opportunity right there.

So what's everyones plans for the weekend? Mine, rather unsurpisingly are going to be pretty domestic. I do have a plan to basically re-invent from scratch Heroku/Now/a.n.other PaaS only better (obviously). Well, that's the plan - more likely I'll get distracted by some weird and shiny new thing that I discover whilst coding the above. Or decide I know exactly how I'd implement it all and thus immediately get bored and not do it. So in reality I'll probably just end up playing playstation 🕹 (Star Wars Battle Fields 2 :rebel: in case anyone cares - it's all I play, and no I'm still not good at it) between boring domestic chores, and thus another amazing idea (again, obviously 😉) will be consigned to the infinite backlog 🚽.

p.s.a. If you are thinking of 3D printing medical equiptment, don't. Stop now, and put down the filament. Almost all publically available materials for 3D printing as horribly toxic in situations they are likely to encounter (heat, UV, water) if used for medical props. You are more likely to kill people then help them. Unless of course you have a qualification in biocompatible material science or something.

p.s. This is beginning to sound like a daily sermon from some hip church on Songs of Praise. Hopefully a break over the weekend will give me some better material.

Notes for further days¶

social distancing == software devs specialist skill?