As the Covid 19 pandemic lessens in importance – or so it seems – I wanted to take stock of the lessons learned over the last two years and look forward to a bit more normality including more activity on the blog. Like many other IT personnel the Pandemic brought its own challenges and issues. A much higher sustained work load was the general result of the change in working patterns but in this case the period of time that that effort was required was unlike anything I have experienced in almost 35 years in IT.
In essence the right kit and policies for remote working were essential for the transition almost overnight to WFH. Usefully most of the things required for this change were in position with the exception in some cases of laptops. Speaking to other organisations a lot of them found the security challenges more difficult than expected
So what was done during the lockdowns – first and foremost supporting and advancing progress with clients and projects that were already running or that gestated during the pandemic. In addition some new avenues of interested arose as part of those projects or from other areas I was involved in.
Development
Those included SwiftUI and its core Swift, Flutter and Dart and finally C# and Blazor. I was struck by the similarities between these different technologies and generally happy with how they fitted the bill for the purpose they were chosen. Expect many more articles about these 3 platform as time goes on and more time is available to publicise them.
Security
In addition as part of the absorption and replacement of Cyberoam’s UTM platform that I had been working with for quite a few years with the Sophos XG/XGS platforms – it was required to re-accredit with Sophos. I am now a Sophos Firewall Architect and would recommend that package of study if you want to know the XG/XGS platforms well. The XG platform was instrumental in keeping clients safe and secure as a rolling replacement program was carried out across all clients.
Personal development
On a personal note I took the opportunity to spend time learning home recording and chose the Presonus Studio One DAW as the platform to experiment with new virtual instruments. Using the Presonus IOStatio24C has been a pleasure to start recording and learning about mixing and mastering – would highly recommend it as part of a home recording setup especially if generally working alone.
The lack of IT Meetups was probably one of the low points during the last 24 months – I found them a great source of new information and ideas that sadly did not transfer well to an online format.
So as you can see it has been a busy period during the process of learning to “Living With Covid”. Hopefully its going to be more “Business as Usual” as we proceed with 2022! It will also be interesting to see how the hybrid balance of office and WFH settles as the year progresses.