Last Breath of Freedom

So ends my short stint of independence from the workplace. I had a good run, and definitely proved to the powers that be that productivity would not be affected by working from home, whether they recognize it or not. Unfortunately, as is the case in many businesses, giving up that modicum of control that comes with having your employees present in the office is not something they can fathom, so nothing will change for the time being. I do believe, though, that this is the dawn of a new age of how we do business, in general. Working from home has been gaining traction for years now, and the growing trend even before Coronavirus was to allow it on a much larger scale. There are so many perks that I can see for a business to allow working from home; I really don't understand why more businesses don't adopt this model. As a business, if you have your employees work from home, you automatically expand your scope of who you can hire. Now, instead of just being able to hire people locally, you can hire anyone in the world, barring time zone issues. It's also a really nice way to draw prospective employees in; if you were to tell me I can work from home, I'm way more likely to apply and be interested in that position, even more so now. Before Coronavirus, safety wasn't really something employers had to consider in my line of work, but allowing for that safety now to be working from a distance is huge, and I don't think that's really going anywhere in the future. I can only speculate as to why an employer would be against this, but at the end of the day, the tipping point is fast approaching.

I have that feeling you get on Sundays, knowing you have to go back to work or school the next day, which I haven't really had since I started working from home. Sometimes, that feeling can overtake the freedom that comes with a Sunday, but I'm not going to allow that today. I had a nice morning hanging out with my little girl. My fiancé woke up driven to clean the house, and I did my part by occupying the little girl while she got the work done. We watched some videos for a little while, ate, and then played with all of her toys. Not just some of her toys; we had to play with all of them. She's such a happy thing, and now that she's able to put a few words together, it's really fun to try and communicate with her. Half the time, I have no idea what she's saying, but when I do, she is really funny and loving. I really enjoy my time with her, and over the past month working from home, I feel I've grown a lot closer to her. The time I don't have to spend commuting from work and being able to come out on my breaks has been used very well. I'm not looking forward to having to be separated from her during the day, but it was inevitable, one way or another. Soon, my fiancé will be returning to work as well, and she will have to go back to daycare. She really needs that time at daycare, and it's really good for her to interact with other kids and her teachers, but I'm selfish and just want her all to myself.

As usual, my weekends are not without work. I really enjoy studying and learning, so it doesn't feel like a chore. I actually look forward to getting her down for a nap or at night getting her down so I can get some work done. Again, I love every minute with my daughter, but there's something about learning this stuff that's just compelling. I started this journey on May 26th last year and haven't gone a single day without studying for at least an hour, and often much longer than that. That means I'm approaching a year straight of intensive study; pretty cool. As I said yesterday, I'm working hard on Stephen Grider's first course on React Native and learning a lot. He has seemed to skip right to the parts of React that I really want to be focusing on right now, such as using context and useReducer, and I think it's really going to pay off in my day-to-day at work. At work, we are trying to implement reducers quite a bit now, and we both see the value in using useReducer of using useState coupled with context, so this is something I really need to master. I'm getting there, but I'm not all the way. I haven't touched Redux in a long time, but I suspect it would make a lot more sense now than when I first tried to learn it, or the subsequent 5 other times I tried to learn it. These are not trivial concepts, and it just takes a lot of work to understand them. I totally get how important it is to actually create things instead of just following along with tutorials, although I think the latter still deserves attention. I don't think you would be able to create things if you didn't understand the underlying concepts in the first place, but you never truly understand them until you start implementing them and manipulating them.

Until tomorrow!