Welcome to the sixteenth edition of The Catch Block!
In this edition: It's OK to not be normal right now. Plus resilience, lizard brains, Conway, Blazor, Markdown, misusing C#, and why maybe scrum isn't such a great idea after all.
None Of This Is Normal
I've said this before, but it's worth remembering: none of this is normal, and it's OK to not be normal right now.
It's not normal to have all your meetings over Zoom, face-to-face with mere 2D representations of what used to be people you could be in the same room with, lights and sounds that used to be coworkers.
It's not normal to wake up in the morning and not recall what day of the week it is, or what month, because you haven't gone out of your home if you could avoid it since March.
It's not normal to have to wear a mask everywhere, because an unseen disease might spread to you and your loved ones and you wouldn't notice until it was too late.
None of this is normal. Because of that, it's OK to not be normal.
It's OK to do less quality work than you used to; this is not a quality time we live in.
It's OK to need more time to recover from stressful situations; we live in a permanently stressful time.
It's OK to need time to yourself, time to recoup and regain your sanity; we need it more now.
It's OK to hate on Zoom and other remote work tools; in a normal time, we wouldn't be using them nearly this much, and the lights and sounds would be people again.
It's OK to not be OK.
This will pass. It will take a long time, but it will pass, whether by natural immunity, a developed vaccine, or some other method. This disease will fade, as they always do, beaten by human ingenuity and resilience. And when it does, we will go back to seeing people in real life and not over video chat, back to getting quality work done, back to feeling that whatever we are doing is normal. That will happen. What "normal" will be is anyone's guess, but it will happen. Humanity is tough.
Be not OK, if that's what you need. The work will still be there when you are normal again. And, as much as it might seem otherwise, that is coming. It will happen. Hang in there.
Conway's Game of Life on BlazorGames.net
In case you missed the tiny announcement I gave this in last week's edition, I recently added a new game to BlazorGames.net: Conway's Game of Life, with Emojis!
Check it out and let me know what you think! Blog post coming Monday.
Previews and Announcements
- Announcing .NET 5.0 Preview 6 (Richard Lander)
- Announcing Entity Framework Core EFCore 5.0 Preview 6 (Jeremy Likness)
- ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 5 Preview 6 (Sourabh Shirhatti)
- Blazor WebAssembly Template Lands in .NET 5 Preview 6 (David Ramel)
- Delivering on a promise – the essential extension pack (Mads Kristensen)
- Announcing TypeScript 4.0 Beta (Daniel Rosenwasser)
Quality Reads
- You're tired because your lizard brain knows that Zoom meetings aren't natural (Scott Hanselman)
- Go faster with your own re-usable Blazor components (Jon Hilton)
- Misusing C#: Multiple Main() Methods (Jeremy Clark)
- Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong? (Medi Madelen Gwosdz)
- Parse Markdown Front Matter With C# (Khalid Abuhakmeh)
- “Just” don’t (Jessica Kerr)
- How good IDEs help you do the right thing (Christian Heilmann)
- Customizing the Blazor WebAssembly loading screen (Gérald Barré)
- Racism in Software Development & Beyond (Muhammad Rehan Saeed)
Catch Up with the Previous Issue!
Matthew Jones
Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week! Happy Coding!
