COVID Lockdown & beyond

Metro Manila has been in lockdown since March 15. The original plan was only to have it in lockdown until April 14. Whether or not that original plan is going to push through or not is slowly becoming the main conversation the past few days.

I don’t pay it a lot of mind as I’ve been too busy ever since the lockdown started. We launched DepEd Commons. It has been, by far, the peak of my SysAd/DevOps career. It’s where all my theoretical knowledge around scaling sites were finally put to the test and has given me tons of new experience. It gives me a lot of pride that we’ve been able to keep it up and running smoothly while the rest of the online resources available in the government were struggling with capacity.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that I worked on alongside DepEd Commons: 100 Hours by Ignite, Iggy by Ignite, AFI’s Disaster Response Monitoring System, AFI’s AYLC, AFI’s CodeIT. All of these struggled with my attention and I sometimes feel guilty that I have to work on all of these other projects when Commons was sorely needed by the society.

Resource has been a struggle. Since the whole COVID thing started, we suddenly had 4 projects on our plate on top of what we’re already doing. That’s why I had to handle all of those projects on my own. There’s really no one else to tap.

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I kind of missed this - coding day-in and day-out. I’ll probably incorporate this more in my schedule when things go back to normal. Something like:

• Monday - Office
• Tuesday - House
• Wednesday - House
• Thursday - Office/Makati
• Friday - House

I’ll have to think through how to fit gym/yoga/basketball in there though.

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I hope companies would finally adopt video conferencing as the new normal. It would help free up Metro Manila traffic and more importantly, give everyone more time.

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I miss Angel.