Category: Personal

Because of the pandemic I have been working from home for the past four months or so. In late March my company took the decision to let everybody that could work from home do so. Since then I have been sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop, but with an external mouse and keyboard.

So, what’s it been like? I must admit I like working from home a lot more then I thought. I like being in the office and talking to people, discussing things, but being a pandemic and all there’s just no way I would step on the train for my daily commute right now. It took about two weeks for me to get used to everything, but after that I’m quite happy working from home. But what about the small things? Let’s make a list, shall we?
Developers like lists!

Pros:

• No daily commute means less interaction with people
• Since I am not commuting I can work more hours
• Blasting music on my Sonos speakers
• Productivity is pretty much the same, maybe even better
• Sitting at home all day is pretty good for my economy, I never realized I bought so much unnecessary stuff before

Cons:

• Since I am not commuting for an hour a day I cannot find the time to listen to podcasts
• I have no real chair to sit on or desk to work at and my body is suffering because of this
• Small ass laptop screen to work on
• Teams/Slack/Zoom calls have replaced face to face discussions and it’s quite tiring for the brain
• Coffee expenses are through the roof
• “Can you hear me?” / “Can you see my screen?” every god damn time

So the overall experience have been good for my wallet, but bad for my body. I’m still not sure for how long this will last, but at least two more months by the sound of things. I am ready to go on vacation for a couple of weeks anyway.

“Ebolakid? I feel offended!”

First of all: It’s “ebolakid” with all lower caps.
Second of all: Don’t. It’s just a name.

When choosing an online handle you need to choose carefully. I’ve used ebolakid on and off for about 15 years now, and like all things it has an origin. Good or bad, it comes from somewhere.

About 18 or 19 years ago I was in an (for now) undisclosed band. The old songs are on Spotify, maybe I’ll write about it some day. For some reason, as part of our pre-show routine, we huddled up in a circle and put our hands in the middle just like your local sports team does. When everybody was ready we shouted “EBOLA KIDS!” from the top of our lungs. Why we did that I can’t remember. When I was registering for Xbox Live back in 2004 I needed a good gamer tag. For some reason I thought that “ebolakid” would be cool to register and It’d be funny to see how long it took Microsoft to make me change the name.

They never did, so 15 years later I’m still ebolakid on Xbox Live.

When I got into the hobby developer business in 2014 I needed a name to hide behind. For better or worse, I reused ebolakid and everything was set in motion. A year or two later I registered ebolakid.com and here we are.

Depending on how you choose to see it, I either started programming around 1996 or 2016. Back in 1996 I started to learn HTML (It actually was considered programming back then, mind you), in 2016 I took the leap and became a full time C# developer working exclusively with Microsoft Azure.

What I did in the twenty years in between, and why I pursued a career in programming, is probably going to be explained in due time.

For now, welcome to my adventures in and around programming!