We meet again (Post COVID19)

Time flies when you are in the zone or when troubles bury you under.

How long

It has been close to 20 months since I last wrote a blog post and I give my sincerest apologies to myself for waiting so long 🤪.

Well, since I last wrote, a lot happened. I changed 2 companies, moved into a new own house and had a surgery.

The new house

It has been a crazy ride for me, jumping through the hoops trying to get my house ready.

This Covid-19 pandemic only made things worse in that front, what with workers evicting, builder giving up on the work and the interior designers making a mess of the wood-work, etc etc.

My health

Things did not get easy with my health either, I gained weight as I completely stopped going for jogging, started eating junk food again.

Finally it came down to me getting a bad stomach pain one fine morning and it turned out to be acute appendicitis for which I had to immediately undergo laproscopy surgery.

The new normal

Things are slowly coming back to normal. I am finally settling in my new home, into which I moved in July 2020.

But it is still scary in my place because the second wave of Covid-19 is way worse than the first one in India and the word around is that it is going to get even worser.

So, if you are from around here, please take care of yourself and your family, my friend.

The Post-Covid Era

Really, Covid-19 has proved itself to be a great equalizer.

The poor, the rich. The powerful, the weak. The grand fathers, the children. Those in cosmopolitons, those in the remotest villages.

All are equally vulnerable to this pandemic. There is a new normal since the virus hit the world last year. People wear masks, no public gatherings (ish), no family unions, no office, people lost jobs, organizations collapsed, empires shook.

Everyone prayed for it to stop.

Many say it is the beginning of the end, some say a new era has started in human life just with a simple virus.

Virus is one enemy, whereas the swarm of misinformation and panic swirling around in the internet, in social media, print and electronic media are the other enemy.

This tiny parasite tested our resiliance, our committment to taking care for ourselves, our very nature as human beings, it tested them all. So far, we are doing OK but could definitely do better, the virus knows.

In other news

My current and previous projects allowed me to explore a lot in the JAM Stack arena. Fell in love with Gatsby.js and dug in. This love pushed me more towards a Gatsby based portfolio site as well as this very blogging site.

And recently I revamped my blogging site to use a more light-weight static-site generator tool and Docusaurus from Facebook opensource caught my eye. It is very easy to configure and also the developer workflow is simple. So I switched my blogging site alone into this.

My portfolio site is still on Gatsby.js. More recently, I loved the way Next.js stepped up in terms of its capabilities. It now supports both server-side rendering and static site generation, best of both worlds, whereas earlier it used to be just a server side tool.

Future plans

My current company is wonderful, gives me enough work to grow as a developer. My new home is cozy and fresh, so I am happy with it.

For my future, I am looking at two possibilities.

• Find bigger opportunities to excel in my field, most probably outside India. I have always wanted to raise my kids in the North America or Europe, like most dudes in my profession.
• Become self sufficient, which includes having my own passive income by creating learning courses and creating software. This is on the back of my mind for a long time. This is more risky because a lot of this depends on my marketing skills and I am still a bit of a learner there.

Either way, I know one thing: I love the technologies that I work on (both in my day job and my side projects) and I am happy to be here, now.

Thanks for making it this far. Checkout my tech articles and other blog posts. I make YouTube videos occassionally, do check them out.