DWIM(.nl)

During this COVID-19 pandemic many people are forced to work at home. Not by choice, but by necessity. For many of us, this is new territory, for some of us it isn't.I have been working from home for 15+ years. In this post I share how I make that work.My typical work dayThe rest of this post I will try to keep as general as possible, but the tips below are inspired by my personal situation.

Just like everybody else COVID-19 is on my mind constantly these days. In this post I look at what is going on according to main stream media, what other views experts may have, and I try to figure out what is happening.I am not an expert: I am not a virologist, nor a data scientist. So, my intention is to rely on those who are.

I don't usually do Microsoft Bashing, but this one was too good to let go.On LinkedIn I saw an ad which read (translated):Don't let IT get in the way of your growth.Which sounds as sensible a plan as any.But on second thought, this is a very modest objective. Shouldn't the point of IT be to help me grow? And why only growth?When I work on Windows it feels as if it is always in my way.

I have been using VirtualBox for years to manage my virtual machines (including Vagrant). It always worked fine, but with over 150MB in size, it felt a little on the heavy side.Today I looked into Qemu again. In the past I found it too complicated to get to work, but these days virt-manager provides a familiar GUI.

The post The right to be rude by Eric Raymond struck a chord with me:The habit of institutional tone policing, even when well-intentioned, too easily slides into the active censorship of disfavored views.I feel the same way. Although for me the problem is not so much the institutions, but more the unchecked power of small, highly vocal interest groups, that set the tone.

I firmly believe that many differences of opinion are actually differences of perspective. To explain what I mean, the front cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach provides a perfect visualization.We see three complex 3D wooden shapes that seemingly become simple 2D shapes when viewed from different angles. The viewers from the left see the letter E over G, the viewers from the right see the letter G over E, and the viewers from the top see the letter B.

I have done many attempts to wrap my head around MongoDB. As I come from the traditional world of RDBMSs, this does not come naturally to me. But the more I work with Javascript, the more natural the step to Mongo becomes.So far, my attempts to use Mongo failed, due to my inability to overcome the learning curve.