Here’s an update on what’s been going on at freistil IT recently.

Cloudy conditions

We keep modernising our infrastructure automation code. Not only is this necessary to keep technical debt in check, it also allows us to take benefit of Hetzner Cloud, our data centre provider’s elastic server capacity offering. While we’ll keep building on dedicated server hardware like we’ve been doing for a decade, especially for high-performance services such as database clusters, being able to dial capacity up or down with a quick API call will enable us to react even more rapidly to changing demand.

COVID-19

Before I recognised the real impact of the Coronavirus situation, my inability to reach my usual level of focus and work output puzzled me. That’s why I wrote in Weeknote 520: “But even with fully equipped home offices, we still have to adapt to sharing the house with the whole family 24/7, home-schooling kids, to having fewer social contacts and spending less time outside than we’re used to.” It’s important during these trying times that we don’t judge anyone for not being at their most productive. I read a Basecamp blog post in which DHH put it best:

“You can’t put in 100% at work when life asks for 150%.”

Literally talking to the world

Online communication can help mitigate some of the social isolation effects. For me, my live coding stream has been a great way to combine work with social interaction. I’m a member of The Live Coders, a community of software engineers who share their work on Twitch while it happens. This week, I had the pleasure to give a talk at our inaugural The Live Coders Conference. Within only four weeks, we had set up a fully virtual, 14-hour conference with MCs, sponsors, chat moderators and speakers. Thanks to Twitch featuring the conference on the home page, I was able to talk about burnout prevention in front of more than 13.000 viewers! And I wasn’t a little bit nervous. (<- blatant lie)

More live coding

Recently, Markus dipped his toes in the live-streaming waters, visibly enjoying it. Go give his channel division_byzero a follow!