COVID Retrospective

In scrum, work is divided into Sprints. Sprints are defined as any length of time that is appropriate to the team, typically lasting a week or two. A Sprint Retrospective is a ceremony that concludes the Sprint, and is done to identify any process changes that might benefit the team in the future sprints.

This is a personal blog that I resurrect whenever I feel like I'm working on something at least a few people other than me might find interesting. I'm finding myself with some blog-worthy work and decided to blow the dust off this old thing, but was horrified to find my last post was about the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I had a lot of thoughts about how I should pivot back to just casually writing about my career and technology interests. I considered deleting the post, or just restarting the entire blog. Ultimately I decided to leave it out there as the time capsule most of this blog is. A retro post feels like the most expedient way to get back into casual tech posts. Retros are generally timeboxed to a maximum of three hours for a one-month Sprint, and it's been 5-years since my COVID-19 post so this might get a bit long.

Rose, Thorn, Bud is a general way to perform retros and is also used for mental health and mindfulness expressions. That feels like an appropriate frame for such a globally difficult time.

Rose

• Up until the pandemic I was grinding hard on the work part of the work-life balance. When I wasn't committing serious hours to my current employer I was picking up side jobs. Seeing so much loss and isolating with those I care about most has forever changed my desired work-life balance.
• Opportunities for remote work are here to stay. Various return-to-office policies are working their way back in, but if you're an engineer that wants to find work in a different state that is much easier than in 2019, and less likely to change.
• Vaccine research has had permanent gains. mRNA and Walter Reed's SpFN offer opportunities for rapid development and broad coverage that would not be as far along without the global attention COVID-19 earned.
• While I never got into baking bread I my wife took on houseplants and I took on fish keeping as bored-to-tears-at-home hobbies. Both are still going strong.

Thorn

• The death and despair created from this should not be understated. Excess mortality had massive peaks, and still has a raised baseline even today. Whatever methodology you use and by whatever % it under-counts or over-counts it is undeniably millions of people gone that have left behind millions of families.
• While the initial response offered some reason to be hopeful it didn't take too long for the fear turn to anger, and for the loudest corners of the internet to use that rage as megaphones. My personal experience with this was posting a sales ad for half a role of toilet paper on March 13, 2020 to poke some fun at the toilet paper shortage. My ad initially got a lot of traffic and amused comments. By April I had forgotten about the listing until I started getting notifications of new comments on it that were all death threats, and so I took it down.
• The worst parts of online discourse found themselves into the real world pretty quickly. Facebook groups of angry parents that knowingly or unknowingly got their information from disinformation campaigns found themselves motivated enough to go protest nearby schools and school boards. That atmosphere created clickbait headlines and 'both-sides' coverage that has proven even more damaging than the social media environment it spawned from.
• Despite a the suggestions of a fantastic ad about going back to the office virtual school was a lot harder than virtual work. My kiddo was in preschool and the initial lockdown simply ended the school year early. Come September we embarked on 100% virtual kindergarten. To this day they have nothing nice to say about kindergarten. I feel fortunate that they were not of an age that they had to miss a prom or graduation.

Bud

• The scale of the pandemic's challenges has generated a lot of evidence on just how bad humans are at relating to large numbers. Something that will impact how we can more effectively communicate disasters in the future.
• The organic rise of social media platforms accidentally created environments where information and disinformation could be amplified easily. While there's not yet a moderation strategy that solves that, we have learned a lot. There are also promising projects aimed at federating content which could lead to more objective social media networks.
• Recognizing the challenges of our current information environment has spawned projects and organizations of all kinds that are setting out to address the issues. At the consumer level there's the rethinking of social media as a protocol, and at the research and national level there are evidence-based policymaking initiatives like the Institute for Research on the Information Environment.

That's my formal retrospective, and hopefully the last time I'll feel compelled to share anything about a pandemic ever again.

To address the length between posts. This blog itself felt too heavy to continue in the face of the real world in 2020. I had initially revamped it at the start of 2020 because I was considering pursuing a new CTO role. I was working in an environment where I was perpetually at odds with ownership, and once the pandemic started things got significantly worse. Ownership was not comfortable with remote work in general, and put a lot of pressure on everybody to evidence what they were doing with their working hours. Between the state of the world and the state of the office I routinely received calls from colleagues in tears, and couldn't seem to find a way to influence better outcomes.

In the face of that I changed my job application from CTO to anything that seemed like a reasonable fit. I quickly found a DevOps role which I was very happy with. I've always enjoyed engineering problems more than business problems, and coming off of a tough business engagement I was eager to focus on automating deployments and reducing operational friction. Between a bit of imposter syndrome and wanting to refocus more of my free time at home I just never really felt up to writing a blog post.

While spending so much time at home I rediscovered a joy for music I'm not sure I've had so strongly since high school. I credit Two Minutes to Late Night's series of covers for resparking that. It's not that I ever stopped listening to old favorites or exploring new artists, but the combination of being stuck at home, watching all those great musicians also being stuck at home, and covering some old favorites really reminded me of the joy I get from music. Seems like I'm not alone in that given how many artists are reuniting since even pre-pandemic break ups. Stranger Things building a Metallica music video into the plot of Season 4 felt like it was meeting a collective moment of resurgence.

Here in 2024 I couldn't be happier where I am. Like the rest of the DevOps world I'm shifting to Platform Engineering and that has been really exciting. I took some time off, spent Christmas with the family, and am feeling good about writing about some Infrastructure-as-Code patterns and challenges I've solved recently. I'll pick up the timeline too when I get some of the more current subjects under my belt. 2013 was my first year of a startup and it feels particularly daunting to write about, but I'll feel up to it sooner or later I'm sure.