Another morning of moving office stuff. This time actual movers were involved as well, for bulky, heavy furniture. The new office now has actual furniture.

Urb-it, the client where I’m on assignment right now, is moving to a new office. I spent the morning packing, carrying, unpacking and organizing office and tech equipment.

It feels a bit odd to be get this kind of tasks as part of my software consultancy position. I’m an expensive mover.

But really, why not? If this is what the team leader prioritizes for today, let’s get it done. And I rather enjoy it. It’s nice to occasionally do such a well-defined task, with such clear and immediate results.

The new Urb-it office is on the same street as the tretton37 office, with just three buildings between them. This is going to be very convenient. It was convenient already today: even after we were done moving our things, the new office is not ready for use (lacking desks and chairs, for one thing) so I took my Urb-it colleagues with me in the afternoon and we worked at the tretton37 office for the rest of the day.

I do technical interviews for tretton37 pretty regularly. I’m so used to doing them online now that I can’t even really remember what it felt like to do it the other way, physically in the same room with a candidate and my co-interviewer. Although I know for sure that that’s the way they used to be done.

I take notes on paper. Sloppily, sometimes missing the end of some words, because my main focus is elsewhere. There’s no way I could type while interviewing – it just gets too distracting. But afterwards I type up proper notes in a template we have.

My pre-interview prep includes setting myself up with 4 sheets of A4 paper, a pen, one large glass of water, and proper lighting. Two hours of talking – even though I’m not the one doing most of the talking, by far – is thirsty work.

Halfway through this interview I could already feel the lack of energy in the room, and see my colleague struggling not to yawn. A clear sign that this wasn’t going anywhere.

Python code beaten into submission, another pair of socks finished. A good day at work.

90% of the code we have at Urb-it is .NET. Whenever I have to work with any of the remaining 10%, it takes hours to even get started. It took me three hours on my own, and then another two hours together with two more developers, to get the python project to build and run on my computer. Even though I’ve done it before on that same computer. Some damn package gets updated somewhere and boom, there goes my afternoon. But that was yesterday, so today was pure productivity.

My knitting is as much part of my daily work equipment as my conference speaker and web camera. Although not quite as much as my mouse and keyboard. Online meetings without knitting make my whole being itch with impatience.

All the covid restrictions will be lifted on September 29th and it’s time to start getting rehabituated to office life again. At least a little bit. Show my face, get to know all the new colleagues who have joined and whom I’ve never seen – and the all ones I’ve interviewed but not met in real life.

I’m thinking Fridays at the tretton37 office to begin with, and adding some other day at the Urb-it office later.

It’s going to be good, I know, but the idea of getting up early and then having to commute there and back still doesn’t makes me happy. But tretton37 treats us all to lunch once a month and tomorrow is one of those days so that’ll give me that extra push to get me out the door.

Since I have no permanent desk at the office any more, I’m going to have to carry an awful lot of stuff with me if I want to work comfortably. There will be a desk and a chair and a monitor, and I’m sure I’ll find an OK keyboard. I’m actually not too fussed about keyboards these days, as long as they provide a minimum of tactile feedback and aren’t completely flat.

But I’m going to want my wireless mouse, and my mouse mat with wrist support. And since I’m sure I’ll spend a few hours in meetings, I’ll want a proper webcam (because the built-in one in the Dell laptops is, unfathomably, situated under the screen for a truly horrible camera angle) and a proper microphone (because the built-in one sucks, and I’ve never become friends with tiny in-ear headphones, and a large headset is even bulkier than my microphone/speaker puck). Plus the computer, and a pair of indoor shoes, and my rucksack is going to be full and heavy.

It turns out that my webcam fits perfectly inside the lens bags for my old Nikon lenses. The bags are just the right size and shape, and soft and padded of course. I lost the camera and its lenses in the burglary four years ago but I still have the lens bags. They’re well-made so I didn’t have the heart to throw them out. Now they come in very handy.

Busy days at work again, but I can’t skip lunch every day, so now lunch is something that I can prepare in 5 minutes and eat at my desk while barely looking at it.

Five months after starting this assignment, I finally met (most of) my colleagues at a team picnic. It felt so normal and somehow also very strange.

In video meetings, you only see the front of people’s upper bodies. Of course you make up a mental picture of the rest of them, but seeing them in person nevertheless came with surprises.

The big thing is that on screen you can’t see how tall people are. Some of my teammates were taller than I had thought; some not. Some just didn’t move or sit or stand the way I had expected.

But there were also small surprises that never would have been surprises in a normal year. One turned out to have a tattoo that I hadn’t seen. One had graying hair at the back of their neck.

This year’s summer party at work took place remotely on Google Meet. I enjoyed it more than I had expected.

First a tretton37 mixologist led us through making fizzy summer cocktails. I replaced this with bubbly pink lemonade even though there was a non-alcoholic option because it sounded like more work than it was worth, just with buying all the ingredients, but this was a lot of fun just to watch, as TV or something. I have some hilariously funny and entertaining colleagues.

Then we had a quiz on Kahoot while chit-chatting in the Google Meet. I made it into top 5 (out of 80+) for a while and for a moment even reached second place, but the last 10 questions for double points were all music-related and by the end I wasn’t even in the top 10.

The party ended with a live streamed concert of covers of rock classics with song and two acoustic guitars. Live streamed concerts are not like the real thing, but when I’ve met the people in real life before, it’s almost like the real thing. And yet again I was super impressed with what talented colleagues I have.

Today’s lunchtime talk went well, with the live coding and everything. We had some last minute technical problems which we solved with literally a couple of minutes to spare. Firefox refused to share camera and desktop at the same time, and Chrome refused to share the desktop at all, so I ended up joining the session twice – once from Firefox for the camera feed and once more from Chrome to share my desktop. And those two took so much CPU that the performance of all other applications really suffered. Builds were much slower than normal and I kept having to wait, and asking the audience to wait, before I could show the results.

It all worked out in the end. Even my time estimates did! I got done when I had hoped to be done, and had time for a few questions in the end.

If you want to hear the talk, you can find it here.