Hi. Yeah. It’s been a minute.
So, what have I been up to? Good question! I am tempted to say “just surviving”, but that would be a bit of a lie. While things have been still rough for me in the second year of the pandemic, there were (and are) improvements on various fronts. The major one being that we now have a vaccine widely available here in Germany and we are in the process of getting it approved and ready for kids, too (that day can’t come soon enough, though!). Looking at the worldwide situation, this is indeed a very privileged position to be in.
So even with the new wave of infections and too many people not yet vaccinated I am hopeful that we will soon be at a point were we don’t need to worry too much – the pieces to resolve this crisis are all here and we will eventually put them in place. Yes, it’s taking longer than I like, and yes, the politics and stupid decisions are driving me nuts, but in the grand scheme of things we are still solving this at an incredible speed (the time-to-vaccine still amazes me…).
As you can see, the pandemic is still very much on my mind … but that’s not all (and I really feel that this is a big improvement, mentally at least)! There is also the side project that I started that earlier this year that has me super excited. It’s taking longer than I initially hoped (no surprises here), but it’s taking shape and we are very close to properly revealing it.
Ah, and let’s talk a bit about consuming stuff: The new Pro Macs are really, really enticing. They seem to have the performance and build quality that my cursed MacBook Pro from 2018 lacks (looking at you, blinking Touch Bar and broken keys…). The funny thing is that I was super sure that I wanted to have a fixed workstation here in my office – like a MacMini or iMac – and not a portable computer. But the reality is, that even if Covid-19 accelerated and normalized remote working, we are still ways off for it to be the only mode of working. And to believe that I won’t be traveling to clients where I’d need to be able to use all the tools at my disposal is probably foolish. For a while I thought that the iPad was enough for cases like these, but the reality is that I am still not able to cover 100% of the things I need to do – or at least not with the ease and convenience that a proper Mac affords (e.g. UI design and prototyping work in tools like Sketch, coding, running a local server, etc.). So all of this leaves me eying these new Macs. A lot.