Gabriel Garca Marquez will excuse my admittedly poor pun on his superb book’s title, but it was hard to resist! By the way, if you haven’t read “Love in Time of Cholera”, do yourself a favor and pick it up for a treat. It’s a true masterpiece and a must-read, even more so if you can read in its original Spanish.

Going back to our subject. Times are hard: political uncertainty, COVID-19, working from home, dealing with a lot of stress in our daily life. We all try to cope as best as possible and I thought it could be useful to share a few tidbits on how it’s done here, in our home. Maybe it is the place for a bit of background; I started my first job as a developer in January 2020, then it’s been WFH since mid-March. I work for a small non-profit, revamping their main app’s UI from the bottom up. We are mainly a .NET shop with SQL Server. Our frontend is JavaScript/CSS/HTML with a bit of jQuery and Bootstrap.

On a side note, I am very happy there and I really enjoy my job. Unlike a lot of people I know, I still have a job… The immense majority of my buddies in the food business are mostly out of work and it’s really a disaster for them and the whole industry. I left the business 3 years ago and switch to software engineering, just in time it seems.

I have been working at home since mid-March in a good way, producing some decent code in line with my bosses’ expectations. To start, let me say we are quite lucky to live in a house in this New Jersey town within walking distance of about every retail. We turned our second bedroom upstairs in an office for my partner. My office is in the living room at the ground level, where it was already set up. Before my present job, I spent almosta year looking for it and most of what is described below comes from this period of intense job search. In order to be comfortably working eight hours a day, I found that focusing on the following points was really efficient and allowed me to perform well:

• A comfortable and professional desk space.
• A balanced daily routine.
• Hobbies and non-professional interests.
• Taking care of me and my well-being.

NB: I have no connection, commercial or personnal, with the companies, brands or devices mentioned in this post. I am not trying to sell, promote or recommend any of them. It’s just a mention of what works for me.

Desk Space

I really like my work space. There is a large table which, if I remember well, is an old Ikea wooden top that I resurfaced with stain and polyurethane. I have the space to spread my notes, papers, legal pad and doodahs. It supports my laptop, mouse and keyboard. I like my Surface book keyboard a lot but an Ergo keyboard fits my big fingers much better. My laptop is connected to a deck for power, wired internet and display on two 27” monitors. Both are large enough to split in two windows each if needed. VS Code is usually on one of them. With the laptop, this gives me five large display spaces. If I need a terminal window, the VS Code terminal is pretty handy for a quick WSL space with Ubuntu.

The room has a good light and a couple of additional light sources are placed around the table. It lets me look outside from time to time.

The sitting is of course a primordial element. I splurged a bit on a very good gaming chair, the Titan from Secret Labs. It’s firm enough and provides a great sitting arrangement for the long hours I spend in it. In addition, I installed a Sonos One for some music and my favorite radio station. I like some low level ambiance when I work. There is also a printer nearby and a high open cabinet I built for all the little stuf and office supplies. Overall, the room is cozy, rather quiet and relaxing with the wood panels and the fireplace.

Daily routine

I am a morning person. The night owl developer who can’t function if there is light outside? Not me at all. So I’m up rather early, around 6:30am. It leaves ample time for a solid breakfast, a liter of coffee (more on that later) and 30 to 40 minutes of exercise. It is a complete sequence of movements with weights as well as body weight reps. I try to keep to it, with more or less success (shoot me!).

I start between 8:30 and 9:00 by laying out my To-Do list for the day, and checking out my weekly To-Do. Most of my “good” coding is done before noon and the second part of the day is more for emails, revisions, refactoring, debugging, testing some ideas or designing features for the next day. We have a Monday “stand-up” and a Team meeting on Thursdays via Teams. My colleagues and me are regularly exchanging emails and messages as needed.

I prefer to dress casually but still professional. I do like comfy attire but I think that dressing the part helps to be in the office mind-set, at least for me. Sweat pants and old ratty T-shirt are more my weekend garb. Then one never knows when a Zoom or Teams call will come. Finally I feel more efficient and alert if I’m dressed like I’ll be in the office.