tretton37 usually holds regular code lunches in our offices. Now that we can’t do that, we’ve moved our knowledge sharing events online. Today it was my turn to do a talk – a repeat performance of a talk I’ve done before, but this time streamed on YouTube instead of talking to a live audience sitting in front of me.

It felt weird at first to talk to a camera instead of real people, but I got used to it pretty soon. I found a decent setup with all the screens and windows and peripherals, with my presentation notes close to the camera. And I managed to get my talk done within my allocated time, just barely. I do tend to ramble on sometimes.

I noticed afterwards that I wave my arms a lot. When I speak in front of an audience, it feels natural to move around and gesticulate, and I imagine it looks normal. On screen, it seems more distracting. If I do this again, I’ll have to try and tone down the gesticulating.

Here’s my talk about multi-tenant architecture, in case you’re interested.

It feels like summer outside. I cycled in just a tank top today!

I do still miss the office and the daily contact with my colleagues, but now that I’m getting my routines in place, it’s working out better and better, I am even finding new advantages in working from home.

Routines help. I go to “work” at the same time every morning, when Eric and the kids leave for work and school. I put on “work” clothes in the morning, instead of lounging around in the same comfy-but-worn things all day, every day. I take a proper break in the middle of the day for exercise and lunch.

The advantages mostly stem from flexibility. The difficult part is balancing that flexibility against the routine. I can go out for a long walk whenever I want – but because it’s so flexible, I keep thinking that I’ll just finish this little thing and go out later, and the “later” never quite arrives.

Today, though, I made great use of my flexibility and took some self-portraits in my home office at the end of my lunch break. I would feel more than a bit awkward doing that in the office.

For the first time since this WFH semi-quarantine started, I exercised. At home and on my own.

I much prefer group exercise. I like having a scheduled time that gives me that extra push. I like having someone else pick the music and plan the session. And I really, really like having someone shout encouragement at me.

But none of that is happening now. The gyms are still open but I really can’t see how that’s a good idea.

I’ve made some half-hearted attempts to work out at home but they all fizzled out. Today I think I found a key to making it happen: pretend that I’m doing it for real. Don’t just walk away from the computer – lock it. Don’t just take off the sweater – change into proper workout clothes. Put on workout music; bring out the dumbbells.

This felt good.

Various reasons took me to the office today.

1.
An appointment with an optometrist with Ingrid, a few blocks from work, which unfortunately got cancelled just before, because the optometrist was off sick. She’s been waiting for that appointment since we first discovered her vision problems in December 2018, and it already got postponed once, so this was rather a disappointment. And probably all that the optometrist has is a slight cold.

2.
A job interview with a potential new hire at tretton37. While we generally work from home, the candidates get the choice between remote and face-to-face interviews. Today I had one of each.

The remote one was my first remote technical interview, and it was a bit of a challenge. We always do these in pairs, and a surprising amount of coordination between myself and my co-interviewer apparently happens wordlessly. The most noticeable difficulty was in taking turns – signalling when I wanted to jump in, or seeing whether my colleague was waiting to say something. In a room, three people naturally sit in more or less of a triangle, and it’s very obvious whether I’m facing the candidate or my colleague. When we’re on screens, they are both right in front of me, separated by a hand’s breadth. I am inevitably always facing both.

3.
While I was there anyway, I brought home more of my things, especially the plants. The things I need for work I already carried home two weeks ago. Now came the turn for the things that need me, i.e. my potted plants. They had all survived two weeks without water, but probably wouldn’t last much longer than this. Right now I can still go there occasionally to water them, but who knows what the situation is like two weeks from now?

The windowsill in my home office nook is quite full now. I just barely managed to squeeeze in the jade plant and dracaena and others from the office between my African violets.

March 25 is waffle day in Sweden. Why not.

I found a recipe for waffles with lingonberries which sounded delicious. When I tried cooking them, the berries all got burnt and stuck to the waffle iron, no matter how much I coated them in batter. So I ended up putting the lingonberries on top of my waffle topping (of cottage cheese, cucumber, apple and mayonnaise). Not exactly what I had in mind, but it tasted really good nevertheless.

The batter itself was also not very good. The waffles came out floppy and limp rather than crispy – more like thick pancakes. Not a good recipe. I had checked that this was a recipe for “frasvåfflor” based on whipped cream, rather than an egg-based recipe for chewier waffles. I didn’t think that there would be that much difference between one recipe for “frasvåfflor” and another. But apparently there is. Afterwards we compared the recipe to the classic one in Rutiga kokboken and the proportions were way different. Note to self: don’t trust random waffle recipes.

The flashback section at the top of the blog is showing me posts from last year’s Norway ski tour. I look at them with mixed feelings. I had this year’s trip all booked since way back in November and had been looking forward to it for months. It truly is one of the absolute highlights of my year. And now this coronavirus came along and I get no trip. So disappointing.

Instead I am stuck at home. I am also not getting any exercise. Not commuting to work, not going to my gym classes. (The gyms are still open, which surprises me. If people are recommended to work from home and keep away from other people then going to the gym goes against the whole point of it, doesn’t it?)

Working out on my own has never worked for me. It is just too boring; I can’t make myself do it.

I’ve been going for walks but it really isn’t enough. My back is getting stiff and my body is nearly itching with restlessness. This afternoon after I was done with work I simply cycled halfway to the office (to Brommaplan), turned out and cycled home again. It felt boring and meaningless but at least it was something.

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.

I slept really, really badly today and have been tired and listless all day. Had no energy for anything other than reading.

Sometimes my sleep goes wrong. I hover on the edge of sleep and dream weird dreams all night and don’t get any deep, restful sleep at all. They’re not exactly nightmares, not quite – no dreams of falling or being chased – but the dreams are all about something being wrong. I’m going to gym class but I’m wearing heavy boots. I’m in a stairwell and I need to go up but the stairs are not there. I’m in a home (that’s not my real home but it is my home in the dream) but the furniture has been rearranged. I’m in my last year of university but I realize I haven’t taken any of the required courses. And so on. I wake up in the morning and I feel like I’ve barely slept.

Adrian, starving for contact, sat next to me in the sofa and browsed my blog, especially all posts in the “Adrian” category, and showed his favourites to me. From the first photos of him as a baby, to the last few days’ posts about Åre.

Remember that green cardigan that I have now started on four times, and twice gotten most of it done only to realize that it does not fit? (First attempts in 2012 to 2015, then again in January 2018 to May 2018.)

It’s been waiting for me in my cupboard, half-finished for nearly two years. But whenever I think about it I mostly feel frustrated and hopeless, so I never actually pick it up. Instead I’ve worked on various other projects.

It’s time to give up.

This pattern is not going to work for me. Either it’s not right for me as a knitter, or it’s not right for my body – which would explain how I can end up with a cardigan where some parts fit me while others are way too tight or hang loose and floppy.

Today I ripped it all up so I can reuse the yarn. Deep inside me I’ve apparently given up on this cardigan a long time ago, because I didn’t feel the least bit of loss while losing all this work. All I felt was relief.

Adrian likes watching cooking shows. We’ve been watching Sveriges mästerkock together, and he likes Sveriges yngsta mästerkock, the junior version, even better. We’re waiting for the new season to be released. He also watches Gordon Ramsay on his own.

He sometimes asks me if I think I could be on that show, or if some meal I cooked would be good enough for it. I guess that’s a sign that he appreciates my cooking.

The most obvious difference is that the contestants always cook carnivore food. Many challenges are explicitly meat-based. But they nearly never make vegetarian meals otherwise either, even when the challenge to me looks incredibly vegetarian-friendly. (I think a very few pastas and soups have been vegetarian.)

But what if they had a “Sweden’s best vegetarian chef” contest, Adrian asked?

I explained that the food I cook – no matter how good – is of a different kind. I cook everyday food.

The flavours are part of it. My cooking is way more varied and interesting and flavourful than what the average Swede cooks, I believe, but ultimately still comfortable rather than adventurous.

But it’s not just that. I could easily use flavours with more edge. What is it really that makes my food “everyday” food and not “master chef” food?

I think the answer is a low level of complexity.

When I improvise a meal without a recipe (which is often how I approach cooking) I tend to end up with a single complex part, with potentially some simple ones accompanying it. And with “complex” I mean something made up of many elements.

Sometimes it’s just the one complex thing on its own: a soup, or a stew, or fried rice, or even something like a lasagna or frittata. Like the stew in this photo.

Sometimes the complex thing could be a rich saucy thing, or a stir-fry, and then it would be accompanied a simple thing like carbs (rice, pasta, potato, bread) or maybe a separate protein (halloumi, tofu) or vegetables (fried broccoli, steamed asparagus). These simple things may be flavoured or marinated etc, but they clearly have just one main ingredient.

Master chef meals often have several complex parts. If there is a soup, then it has a topping and some dipping sauce for the bread. If there is a meaty thing then it has both a fancy sauce and a complex vegetable thing and possibly even more things.

The meal kits from Lina’s Matkasse were also often like that. That’s why I liked those meals: they had not just new flavours, but often a whole different structure.