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Reason #1: My immediate family (my kids, my sisters and my parents) have been using videoconferencing to keep in contact regularly. I think I’ve seen some of my kids more often because of this. A new tool we’re using is Zoom. It allows several of us to have a virtual get-together. I use Zoom at work, which is where I first heard of it, but hadn’t realised how useful the free version is. The free version limits meetings to 40 minutes, after which you just need to create another meeting. But if you know someone (i.e., me) with a paid account, you can have them host the meetings and go over that limit. It’s easy enough to set up that I might even introduce my parents to the idea, gently.

If I had to put a word on what I’m feeling about all of this, it would be “grief.” In a matter of a few short weeks, just about everything we were looking forward to is gone. Holidays, family get-togethers, celebrations – all put on hold, as everything we once thought stable becomes uncertain. So many people will lose their jobs, their businesses, and even their lives.

I see people going through the stages: The roads in my neighbourhood have been full of the hard-core deniers, off to work as normal. When the schools close next week, even those last hold-outs won’t be able to ignore the pandemic any longer. The next stage is anger. We’re beginning to see that already as people queue for hours for a bag of dried pasta. Bargaining? What is meant by “isolation”, exactly? How far can I push that?

As of today, I’ve joined the hordes told to work from home, for an indefinite and probably lengthy period. It felt weird walking out of the office this evening. I may not see my colleagues in person again for weeks or months, people I’ve spent the bulk of my waking hours with for the last four years.

We are living through an extraordinary, historic time. This compares with 9/11 in momentousness, but is unfolding in slow motion, as farce. Imagine if Coronavirus was as deadly as Ebola? We’ve proven ourselves unready. I hope we learn something.

As described in my previous post, I wanted to automate publishing to this site via Github Actions. As a Jenkins user at work, I expected this to take some time, requiring reading reams of documentation and writing fiddly scripts that don’t work the first 56 times you try them.

In the end it took me about 30 minutes, and hardly any RTFMing.

Publishing workflow

The process I wanted to automate is basically two steps, but it requires a bit of setup. I have to have a Java environment and a Clojure build tool called Leiningen. I also need the Amazon Web Service command-line interface and some environmental variables (the S3 bucket to use, the AWS access key and secret, etc.).

I’ve had this domain for a few years, letting Amazon’s Route 53 auto-renew it each year without actually doing anything with it. I’ve made a few starts, but hubris would always get the better of me. I’d start writing something overly complicated like, say, a single-page app in React (or whatever the framework du jour was at the time). I kept rediscovering the obvious: I’m too busy, and I’m rubbish at estimating what I can accomplish in my free time. I’d get 80 percent there, life would crowd in, the work would languish until some other shiny new technology caught my eye and I’d start again. A cycle of failure.