Quarantine 2, Lockdown 3
This week has been a real in-between week, all of my Semester 1 exams are done, I haven’t been able to leave the house due to my returning quarantine, and I don’t have any new work to do. I’m still trying to fill it as best I can. Mostly I’ve been doing a lot of data structures and algorithms practice, and then also trying to get better at chess. You can see my profile on Lichess if you want to see how that’s going.
A lot of my friends are posting about the boredom of the latest lockdown. Sarah Manavis wrote a great article about why this latest lockdown feels different. For those of us that are lucky the boredom is the worst part, for a lot of other people in the country it’s much harder. The mismanagement of this crisis by my government has caused the deaths of countless people and hasn’t held onto any economic standing. The choices between hard lockdowns and keeping the economy going have been shown to be false equivalences as countries that treated coronavirus like SARS, pursuing aggressive elimination policies, have been able to emerge and live normally. It’s so much harder to stay positive in this lockdown since we’ve already seen the effects of 10 months of failing government policy. At best the Conservatives have been inept, and at the worst corrupt in their handling of contracts.
Trying not to be too negative about it all. Just another armchair critic but it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence in the UK, particularly with Brexit slowly tanking things.
I’m looking for some part-time work too, would be interesting to see if I can build my development experience over the next 9 months while I finish my degree. Otherwise I’ll take something that just keeps my brain ticking over in another way.
Reading List
- The values of Emacs the Neovim revolution and the VScode gorilla
- That XOR trick
- Context switching costs more than you think
- I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
- Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
- Software Engineering is a learning process, working code a side effect
- Teaching Haskell means teaching important concepts
- Intel Problems
- How I Build JavaScript Apps In 2021
- Ten computer codes that transformed science
- Three shockingly obvious ways to make flying less miserable
- The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt
- I Almost Got Fired for Choosing React in Our Enterprise App