How an online tech conference, made me feel excited about the weekend/work
During these uncertain times, things have been really demoralizing. And anyone who has an affinity to go work at an office has struggled really hard. Also, shout out to my extroverted buddies out there, we know it’s tough, you all will still have us to hang out with when all this is over, hopefully soon. One of the side effects of getting demoralized is that there is less drive for making something interesting, at least for me as an engineer, we love building things. I work and then side hustle and then sleep, repeat. But with working from home, there were no breaks or I was just not conscious of them.
Even though there was an illusion of productivity but I didn’t feel creative or interested in what I was doing. Bored. This led me not to work on any of my projects, even my work took a hit(hopefully my boss doesn’t read this 😅). And read medium blogs, not saying it’s bad but does magical things to promote my procrastination.
Then I got a message from a twitter friend, not sure if she would wanna be mentioned so let’s just say that she played a huge role. She sent me the link to get tickets for React Summit — Remote Edition 2020.
In the beginning, I was sorta skeptical but I joined regardless and started watching. Couple of talks in, Lorenzo S. came in with his talk(sorry I didn’t take any pictures), now I didn’t know that he was gonna speak, I had read his articles before, go check it out https://dev.to/kelset. Heard some things and then I found myself interested in what was going on. Shortly after…
Kent C. Dodds came with an AHA moment for me. Now, I have read about abstraction and have worked on some basic proof of concept but all on my own projects. After his talk, I went through my previous work(professional) and I realized how I have not been consistently doing it. Had to keep me from going into depression. But then I realized that I didn’t wanna stop there.
It’s been a day and here are the things I have explored…
Parallel computing in ReactJS
The 1.0 is a Lie
https://speakerdeck.com/kelset/the-1-dot-0-is-a-lie
Why We Argue: Style
Amongst other things, I finished the sprint map for my project https://github.com/wripplefoss/mentorfix (check it out)
So from absolutely feeling like dog crap, I went onto, in my opinion, doing a bunch of productive things I wouldn’t do otherwise, and all that from that one moment of receiving that DM.
I would say that with this pandemic looming a lot of us are burning out without even realizing it. Watching a conference and getting back my curiosity to learn, is just something that worked for me. However, if you are facing something similar, please do something for yourself to keep yourself mentally healthy.
If you are curious about how you can stay a little bit saner, do check out this blog
Where Esther Koon talks about her struggles with and how she is overcoming the lockdown situation.
Stay safe everyone! And keep looking for anything interesting, if you are in need of that piqued curiosity. Reach out to a friend, read a book, listen to a podcast, whatever you wish. Do practice the health guidelines, and let’s support one another through this time, there is nothing to gain or lose here.
Until next time…
