Toilet paper, pasta and canned soup are not the only quarantine shortage items. You know what else is? Webcams.

I decided to buy a web camera yesterday. The cheapest model of any brand will do, I don’t care about the image quality, I just want something that shows a picture of my face.

And there were none to be had anywhere in northern or central Stockholm. I searched the web sites of all electronics chains I could think of, or find on Google Maps, and they were all completely sold out of web cameras. Elgiganten, MediaMarkt, Teknikmagasinet, Webbhallen, Kjell & Co, Clas Ohlson, NetOnNet… All sold out in their central warehouses as well as all their physical shops. Expected back in stock: 10 days from now at best.

In the end I found one model in one NetOnNet shop in Veddesta. About twice as fancy and expensive as I had intended to buy but this was not a time to be picky. I reserved it and cycled there immediately to get it before someone else buys it. It may not have been quite the last one but it was close – when I checked again this morning the stock level was down to zero.

My desk is packed so full of computer equipment now.

I tried making do with the laptop keyboard but it just wasn’t working out for me for coding, so I had to add a full-sized keyboard.

The conference microphone quickly became a must as well. The Dell laptop’s built-in microphone sucks. At first I kept the microphone in a drawer and just took it out when I needed it, but now it’s permanently there.

The camera at least takes no space, perched on top of the monitor as it is. All it adds is another cable.

If working from home is going to be the new normal, I need to be properly equipped.

Yesterday I went to the office to take home one of the monitors. Wrapped it in a blanket and put it in a big bag to carry it home. But if I take the monitor then I’m going to need the dock as well, because the laptop has so few ports. And if I take the dock then I might as well take the mouse and keyboard as well. And if I take the mouse then I’ll also want the mouse pad with wrist support.

I ended up lugging home a very full and very heavy bag. My arms and hands were so tired they hurt when I got home.

Today I set it most of it up on my desk at home. I managed to just squeeze in the monitor between all the other things on my desk.

This definitely makes for more productive working conditions.

But I lost my view… When I look up, I cannot see outside any more. All I see is a big screen. I cannot even see the African violets on my window sill, and they are flowering so nicely right now.

I spent today at the Women in Tech conference since I got a free ticket.

I liked some parts of it, but on the whole I found it a bit too fluffy and not techy enough. Some talks were inspirational – women entrepreneurs talking about their companies and how they use technology to make the world better. (Some of these almost veered into advertising.) Some were sorta-kinda informational but too vague to actually be useful – there was a session about something something AI and humans, and two days later I can’t remember a single point of what was said there. There were several panel debates, mostly too short to reach any kind of interesting results.

I can think of one potential audience that would benefit from this event: female technology students on their way out into the working world, who need inspiring examples to follow.

Women In Tech is not the only network aiming to encourage more women to study technology and work in the IT industry. Various such networks and organizations occasionally invite me to join. But I never do.

Fundamentally it’s because I don’t identify as a “female developer” or a “woman in tech”. It is not how I think of myself. I am a developer, among other developers. I very, very rarely notice the fact that I am one of only three female developers in our fifty-person Stockholm office, and all the others are men.

I’ve never felt or been told that I as a woman “should not” be interested in STEM subjects, “should not” work in technology. Never felt that I am less welcome, less listened to, less respected than men in the same business.

But I guess I’ve been lucky. Both my parents are scientists and it’s always been almost self-evident that I would follow in that direction. (I wonder how they would have reacted if I had chosen to study something fluffy and less employable like, say, sociology, or art history. Or not gone down the academic path at all and become a hairdresser.) I’ve always been encouraged at school, and I’ve always worked at incredibly meritocratic firms.

Work was stressful and rushed all autumn, all the way up to Christmas. At one point, it looked like we might have to work the weekend before Christmas. Somehow we got it all sorted out without having to work on weekends or holidays, and we all heaved great big sighs of relief at the end of the year.

But 9 months of short-term thinking have left their traces. We’re instinctively still rushing, still thinking we need to hurry hurry hurry. The duct tape and bubble gum solutions we had to build in some places are not getting fixed. We’re not adding to our debt burden, but we’re not paying it back either.

We’ll have to retrain ourselves to slow down again. To not take shortcuts – because we don’t have to. And we’ll have to retrain our product owner to not expect that kind of pace, and to make her understand how unsustainable it was.

I filled the advent calendar again this year. It’s a mixture of small gifts and tasks. Underwear is a prominent part, since both Ingrid and Adrian have outgrown most of theirs and need new ones.

Yesterday’s “gift” was the opportunity to choose a new desktop background for me. Adrian chose for my home computer and Ingrid for the work one.

What you see here is Ingrid’s chosen wallpaper in all its triple-monitor glory. I can’t deny that it holds a certain appeal, and it’s been a great conversation starter, but looking at its over-the-topness for more than a minute is enough to make my brain hurt. I normally choose the calmest possible wallpapers, like the one here.

Adrian’s choice was an abstract picture of red and blue fire on a black background. There’s more energy in it than in the taco cat, but at the same time it is quieter.

I walked to my desk this morning, unpacked my things and sat down to work. Not noticing at all that the desk to my right had been swapped with another. It is still a white desk but everything about it is different. It has that privacy panel right next to my desk (the other desk didn’t). It has one monitor (the other desk had two). There is a different chair in front of it.

And I didn’t notice any of it! Until an hour later, when the guy who now sits there arrived, and I saw that it wasn’t the person who usually sits there. The desk, within arm’s reach, was completely different than it used to be and I just didn’t notice anything. Not even a large, dark privacy panel privacying right inside my field of view!

Even worse. They later told me they had moved their desks around yesterday afternoon, so I had sat next to this new arrangement already yesterday and not noticed anything.

Total tunnel vision. All I see is what is right in front of me.

Attended leetspeak, the tretton37 developers’ conference.

The morning sessions were less technical and focused on the ethics of software development. “Code that goes wrong – is it my fault?” Interesting discussions. What is our responsibility? When should we say no? A few thoughts and comments that I especially remember:

• Do project managers and product owners expect us developers to always deliver faster and faster because they cannot understand the complexity of what we do? Or is it because we keep feeding their expectations, and delivering faster than what is sustainable?
• It is perfectly possible and even easy to become a developer without ever having considered the ethics of this profession. There is no certification required. Anyone with a two-month JavaScript boot camp under their belt can start calling themselves as a developer. Even if you have a CompSci degree, ethics courses are usually optional.
• Every developer should give some thought to two things. One, where does your line go? What are the things that you would say no to? (Weapons software? Gambling? Lying to your users?) Two, what is your path of escalation? If you see something you need to say no to, and your manager will not listen, who do you talk to?
• One of the panel members worked with online marketing. When the question about everyone’s “lines” came up, she jokingly said that if that’s the case then she would have to quit her job entirely. “Then you should,” was my immediate thought, “and the world would not miss what you have been doing.”

The highlight of the afternoon was Eric Wastl’s behind-the-scenes talk about Advent of Code. Passionate and inspiring, interesting and entertaining.

We finally deployed code that we have been working on for just about forever. We’re all out of energy but found the energy to celebrate with some chocolate cake.

This was release 1.3.5.

A new colleague at work is a serious foodie and worked as a chef in a previous life, so he is bringing all kinds of new food ideas to the office. He’s brought us home baked sourdough bread for breakfast, just because. And for today he arranged a potluck temaki lunch. Everyone brought an ingredient, and then we made temaki together.

The chef ninja explained temaki to us as “sushi tacos”. Take a piece of seaweed, spread some rice on it, then pile on whatever you like on top of the rice. Roll it up and you’re done. Restaurant temaki are elegantly cone-shaped, but apparently just sloppily rolling it up before biting into it is perfectly acceptable as well.

I’ve always thought that making sushi at home seems like a lot of bother, so I’ve never tried. All this rolling and shaping… and then someone wants this on their sushi and someone else definitely does NOT want this… But with this approach, sushi becomes quite doable: very flexible, and almost no prep work apart.

This was a very busy day with talks and presentations and workshops and so on, and I barely remembered I owned a camera, which is a pity. This is the only photo I have from today – from my walk back to the hotel after dinner.

My own presentation was very well received and – if you’ll excuse me for boasting – I’ve already been asked if I can do it again for other audiences.

For the technically minded among you, the title of my session was “Fumbling towards multi-tenancy” and I talked about how we took the application that I’m currently working with from “what’s a tenant” to multi-tenancy. I spoke about the choice between multi-instance and multi-tenant apps, and then multi-database vs shared database for the data layer. And some technical details about implementing our chosen path (multi-tenant with a shared database) using .NET Core and Entity Framework: query filters, defensive saving and row-level security.