From a purely IT perspective, a lot more infrastructure to do with working from home is being thoroughly tested. Knowing how large numbers of home workers cope with the isolation and the infrastructure available within their companies could lead to even more people working away from company offices. This in turn could lead to better comms infrastructure, but with reduce commuters to major centres of work, the public transport companies may have to scale back. In turn less sandwich shops, less taxis, etc.
People going through this sort of experience I hope will lead to people taking on a greater expectation of the importance of good hygiene. When the flu seasons starts again at the end of the year this experience will hopefully still be strong in people's minds and they'll be more careful about simply ignoring it.
As Winter comes back around at the end of the year I think people may start to change certain habits, more people wearing masks in public as annual flu rises again, people less willing to shake hands or kiss each other openly if they're not already intimate. Many European cultures regard the touch of cheek-on-cheek to be a mark of affection among friends, will that action simply start to die out as people are reluctant to touch each other.
Ultimately you can't tell, but I think post-COVID will certainly a very intersting time for the social behaviour observers and the stats collectors. Interesting times for sure.
Firefox. Of all the browsers I keep trying it's the one I keep going back to, especially at work where we run a huge mixture of webapps some as old as 15 years, some only released within the last month or two, Firefox never has any trouble. Our company mandates IE and Chrome, neither of which run the whole spread so users have to keep switching between the two browsers, but I use FF and only have to keep that open.
Depends upon the driving factor, for work most of us have to pay bills so the requirement for hard cash is pretty strong motivator! That's even more true if you have any dependents like kids. You may have to simply do something you hate short term just get by, all the time make sure you're on the lookout for what it is that you truly want to do. Short term could be days, weeks, months or even years. I'm working a job I don't like but it pays really well, so I've got a 5 year plan to work towards, saving my money, getting money off my hobby so I can hopefully quit my job in a few years time. All the time I'm learning what I need in place when the day finally comes, that's my motivation to keep going that target I've set in the distance. It's doable, it's damned hard to get to but it'll be worth it if i can keep going.
If it's motivation for a personal project, that's far more personal and the first thing is to make sure that the rest of your life is together to give you to the environment you need to get your personal projects done. I'm working on my second book right now, my first did really well but I've lost all the drive to do anything with the second one. The first one burnt me out completely, so I'm trying put things around me that will get me in the right frame of mind and wait for the spark of creativity to light and then I can get it finished.
As a 25 year career DBA, moving to a DB agnostic methodology has merits as it allows very re-usable code, however the downside is that you never get to realise the strengths a particular DB technology can offer in terms of performance. Wriing in ORMS and high-level frameworks may be good for making your product very adaptable but don't expect your product to be lightning fast when it's performance pounded and tested. I've worked on performance testing DB techs and seen what happens when a vendor tries make a "one-size fits all" solution, it quickly loses scalability. If raw performance is your goal, don't even try to be agnostic, tweak every last advantage you need. When you have a trading app that's making thousands of upserts a minute you need every bit of help you can get in your app. If simply allowing data storage is all you need, then agnostic may be right for you. However to throw a curve ball in, buying raw processing power is dirt cheap these days, and you'll get something by throwing more CPU and memory at a problem, but your scalability will tail of at somepoint and you have to decide if that platau point is acceptable.
I learned RDBMS systems via Oracle, the default is READ COMMITTED isolation level, seeing people from non RCI systems experiencing RCI is always interesting. Good little article.
The internet is now so ingrained in our lives, we can't really function without it. We use for bills, timetables, weather and we're so used to having info at our fingertips that we start to get anxious when we can't find something out. 25 years ago if you didn't know something you'd just forget about it most of the time, but now you start worrying and have to know something. Then there's social media, the parasites of the internet, sucking our lives and sanity into a great gaping maw of nothingness. Social media is addictive, seriously addictive, the hit, the reward, the lack of confidence when your standing goes down, hmmm classic signs of an addictive "substance". Back away from it, use it every couple of days but don't get sucked in.
Some fungi are so insidious when you start looking into how they function. They need to land, spore and infect but keep the host plant or animal alive in order to keep feeding itself, so they very slowly kill the host before they spore and move on.
Certainly seen a huge rise in Python use in private banking sector where I work. The problem is that we get people who aren't devs writing Python code against source DBs, we once had to fight off a trader who fired up some Python code with 150 simultaneous connections to a prod DB, we quickly had to instigate limitations on DB connections for normal users, something we should have done long ago.
Our company runs training courses on Python, they're not run by devs or even by the IT dept but by one of the members of the key reporting team, a good Python programmer with plenty of experience in financial modelling but zero IT dev experience. Things are changing.
People going through this sort of experience I hope will lead to people taking on a greater expectation of the importance of good hygiene. When the flu seasons starts again at the end of the year this experience will hopefully still be strong in people's minds and they'll be more careful about simply ignoring it.
As Winter comes back around at the end of the year I think people may start to change certain habits, more people wearing masks in public as annual flu rises again, people less willing to shake hands or kiss each other openly if they're not already intimate. Many European cultures regard the touch of cheek-on-cheek to be a mark of affection among friends, will that action simply start to die out as people are reluctant to touch each other.
Ultimately you can't tell, but I think post-COVID will certainly a very intersting time for the social behaviour observers and the stats collectors. Interesting times for sure.