About year and half ago Covid started to appear in just about every country. Living in Japan I felt, and still feel, safe. The people here are cautious and often wear mask without it anyways. I was working remotely already, so it has affected me little in that sense. Still, the home-time has increased and so has online-time. Here is some kind of list of what has changed for me..

• I moved to mainly using Desktop Linux (from MacBook Pro)
  • From gnome to kde to i3 to bspwm to xmonad (current)
  • I started using more vim (neovim) again, but still mixed with VSCode depending on what I work on
  • Configured a lot of things, optimizing my workflow. I will probably write more about this, and would like to someday release my dotfiles, but since they contain lots of private/work related settings, it feels close to impossible to clean them up to that state.
  • These days when I open MacBook (once in 1-2 weeks), there’s usually just 10-20 app updates, and update popups all over the screen, so I end up using it even less
• I got an Ergodox EZ split keyboard
  • It helped me get rid of some pain in my left arm. I suspect it was caused by switching to the poor butterfly touch bar keyboard without ESC around 2019 summer earlier…
  • Customized the layout
  • Practiced typing with it. I got to over 80 wpm speeds sometimes, but 65-70 is probably average
  • Programming speed has probably increased because of the positions of the special chars and everything being closer to home row in layers
  • The newer Moonlander seems even better, but sadly it was released 1-2 months later
• WebRTC became a part of daily life
  • Developed/helped to develop some webRTC video applications for online nomikais, virtual offices and education
  • I became very comfortable with video meetings
  • Decorated room to have some fun for that
• Web development-wise…
  • Converted more things into typescript and mostly worked with typescript stacks
  • Learned tailwindcss, which I’m a huge fan of now. It’s really fast to develop with.
  • Got deeper into vue/nuxt and react/next
  • Websockets, webRTC, some experiments with WebAssembly, WebAuthn, not enough WebGL
  • Advanced things with kubernetes
• Programming languages
  • Learned haskell (for configuring xmonad)
  • Learned elixir, which is now my preferred choice for backends and some kinds of scripts/automation
  • Learned golang. It can have a great developer experience with fast compile times, but not sure if it’s for me
  • Also some hobby projects with rust, lua and godot.
• Did more consulting projects
  • Web applications ranging from various stuff from rails, golang, rust, java, php backends with vue/react frontends
• Setup own mail servers with custom domains
  • It seems stable enough, but still kind of too much work to move away from gmail (someday for sure!)
• Migrated away from many services and recovered old data
  • Subscription services are out. I quit many.
  • Home NAS + hosted basic level web server with open-source services is cheaper and more flexible
  • Found out about Obsidian. It’s excellent and using it to almost all of my notes
  • Found my old (probably ~2005) laptop, and 250GB disk containing old memories
• Cleaned up my domain and web site setups
  • Moved almost everything to single registrar
  • Optimized for less sites, less servers, less things to maintain
• Built my 3-year old his first computer from raspberry pi and touch panel… but iPad and Switch are so much easier :)
• Played some online games first time in a long time

Overall the covid times have felt extremely boring, but looking back it’s not that bad. I’ve learned new things and enjoyed fair amount of outside time also, in parks, walks, picnics, beaches and BBQs.

In near future covid restrictions will cease, but I don’t expect it to affect me too much since things were remote before it also. Tech-wise, I would like to move more and more things to under my own servers (especially mail, and some other subscription services). I’m also looking forward to trying many Linux desktop related things, from Wayland to new window managers. And there’s a very real possibility of getting a Linux laptop. Other than that, keep developing and optimizing.