I haven’t updated in a while but the world has basically changed since Feb, what with COVID and other crap injecting itself into our lives it’s not surprising that so much has changed.  It was clear that COVID early on was going to have a serious impact what with lock-downs, social distancing, mass layoffs, entire businesses that still haven’t really gone back to work.  For me though luckily COVID has been mostly a good thing, work wise anyway.  COVID encouraged companies to ‘work from home’, and I believe initially that the thought was that the company would lose productivity not being in the office but within a few weeks it was clear that most of management’s fears were unfounded.  I can’t help but think it was difficult for management to let go of the concern that people wouldn’t do their job, but with the full time move to AGILE and weekly sprints there really wasn’t much to worry about.  It was clear that if people weren’t doing their job that it would be easy to tell who wasn’t pulling their weight, with weekly retrospectives it was clear what issues were holding people back so being in an office or being at home really makes no difference.  Now people can be comfortable working at home, the company usually gets more time out of it’s employees since they no longer have to potentially spend hours travelling to the office and overall most people’s outlook improved as the work from home concept has helped a lot with the work-life-balance.

My office basically shut down, we moved all the IT infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web services) and for the most part the overall day-to-day work process has improved.  Yeah sometimes AWS is unreliable, getting IT support can be a mixed bag, voice comms and meetings can be a mixed bag, mostly because I despise Microsoft Teams but I can tolerate it if it means I don’t have to travel on the cattle car daily to downtown to an office cube that is noisy, disruptive and effectively spirit-crushing.  Probably didn’t help that I had to switch offices 4 times in the span of 2 years, each switch worse than the previous.

With COVID and the lockdowns I had a lot of time to improve my knowledge of Angular, bought a few online courses and revised my long-standing game prototype from Thymeleaf and Bootstrap to a pure java REST servelet to an Angular front-end.  The code is a lot easier to understand and maintain as Angular is a great framework as opposed to loose and raw HTML and javascript everywhere.  I did have to relearn a bunch of things that I was familiar with Bootstrap, some things are harder to do (stuff that expects to run on bootstrap javascript) but overall I found work arounds with Angular that work well.

I also found Selenium which I have playing with recently.  In using Angular and Arquillian I was pretty confident that I could unit test a lot of functionality but with Selenium there is no reason why the entire application couldn’t be tested as well.

On the topic of gaming I will likely skip the new console launches this fall, there just isn’t enough compelling software for either machine at launch.  COVID likely put the hurt on a lot of dev houses so it feels like a lot of software won’t really be available to 2021 so I can wait until then, consoles should be a lot easier to come by then as well.

I do want a new GPU but considering how hard it is to get a 3080 I might have to wait until 2021 for that too which is a drag.  I’m hoping AMD has a competitive product so I could skip Nvidia this gen but I’m not convinced yet.  I’ll happily eat crow if the new Radeons are as good as the Ryzen CPUs at being competitive.

I’d also like to pick up the Quest 2 or the Reverb G2 however without a new GPU there isn’t much point, my current 980 just isn’t up to snuff for the beating some of the newer headsets would put on it.