Monthly Archives: May 2020

Why home office can be more productive than office work

Top 5 not so obvious reasons why working at home can be more productive than working at the office.

  1. You are not bound to office opening hours. Lots of home office workers can shift some of their work to early morning hours or evening hours, so during the day time they can spend more time for their personal life. Which makes them more happy employees, which in turn makes them more productive and has a positive impact on their work and their company.
  2. You are less likely to call in sick. For one, if you are only mildly sick, you can probably still manage to get most of your work done from home. And second people tend to watch their health more closely these days, either to prevent being infected by Covid-19 in the first place, or to just prove corona virus warnings wrong.
  3. Usually it is more quiet at home than at work. Many people will claim the opposite, so here are some examples:
    – Noisy construction work can also be going on at your work place. You are just less likely to recognize it because you are more stressed out anyway.
    – There are simply far more people around at work than at home. And yes, they can also ignore your privacy chit chatting about private issues they might have experienced in their personal life while you are trying to concentrate and finish your deadline.
    – No, there are no children at work, but there are shoulder taps, banging doors, visiting customers, etc. It all depends on how sensitive every individual reacts to certain environmental distractions. Most parents for example are highly alert when their child is playing in the room next door, but can totally relax and shut off if 20 business customers are chit chatting next to them while waiting to get picked up. It’s a matter of personal perception.
  4. People tend to be less late for online meetings, phone or video conferences. You don’t accidentally run into “important talks” while on your way to the meeting room.
  5. Sometimes it pays off to “work smarter not harder“. Sit back and take some time to think about a problem instead of hacking onto the keyboard for hours in order to appear busy.

Free Julian Assange

Britain’s politically motivated show trial for Julian Assange’s extradition hearing is now scheduled for 07.09.2020.

https://change.org/JulianAssange

Weird things to remember about this trial:

– Assange is not a whistleblower himself, he just published information that U.S. government employees revealed to him. In that sense he is protected by the laws of journalism.

– The very same government that he exposed of committing war crimes is now putting him on trial for espionage. Can that be a fair trial?

– The only crime he might have been committed was assisting others to break into U.S. government computers. But because he exposed war crimes of the U.S. government, the trial should take place in front of an “independent” court. As he is an Australian citizen, this trial should obviously take place in Australia.

– By the time the information was exposed to him and to the public, he was not living in the United States, nor is he a U.S. citizen.

– How can it be a crime to reveal a crime?

Don’t reinvent the wheel …

As a developer or DevOps you probably heard it a hundred times before:
” … ah and by the way for the new project … try to find an existing library to solve the problem. Don’t reinvent the wheel, that would cost too much time.”

And probably there were more than a couple of times when – after scrambling through dozens of GitHub projects – you thought: “I wish I had started to reinvent the wheel right from the beginning!”

So here are my top 5 reasons why to “reinvent the wheel”:

  1. The only already existing code is a “rainy-Sunday-afternoon-good-enough-for-my-Raspberry Pi-home-project-provided-as-is-without-comments-or-error-checking-only-once-tested-on-my-12-year-old-20-minutes-startup-time-crashes-every-2-hours-Windows-Vista-laptop” GitHub project.
  2. The only GitHub project you can find is bloated with functionality you don’t need at all, and it takes you 2 days to find out that the 10 lines of poorly written code that you actually need does not work anyway.
  3. You need to install 15 additional mysterious libraries that were last updated 8 years ago.
  4. The only existing project is a 8 GB of RAM sucking Java monster that takes 5 minutes for cold start.
  5. You spend the next 2 years fixing bugs in code that was never meant to run in production environment.

Get your “pandamnic” math right …

In case you are not that good at math:
The fact that the daily statistics curve of new coronavirus infections is “just” going sideways does not mean that the pandemic is not further spreading. It only means that today there are as many new infections as there were yesterday.

What you need to watch out for is the graph going down to zero. Thank you.