The post-lockdown work rave, abuse, and shortened fuses

This article is a mix of personal stories, social & interpersonal psychology, and technology (with some drive-by remarks about Free & Open Source software). I originally drafted this article in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022, but I needed more time to rewrite it a fourth time (because why not). So, while this post ends up landing straight into the twilight zone “between xmas and New Year”, it has more insights and illustrations and arguably makes for a better-rounded story, even if it’s a 7 to 9 minutes read rather than 5-6.

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Year MMXXI in 8 minutes

Near the end of 2020, I put a lot of thought into reevaluating my business’ value proposition, strategy, and processes. It’s a good thing I did that back then, because 2021 was quite different from 2020; I had much less time to “deepthink”, and I spent a majority of 2021 on an intense work treadmill, which led to me micro-burning out three times in the process. Also, guilt about feeling like I’m not contributing to open-source enough.

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Year MMXVIII summarized in 4 minutes

  • Was super excited to see a GNOME hackfest focused solely on investigating performance issues in GNOME Shell, and the great work that happened from 2019 to 2021 on that front. It made a huge difference.
  • Was thrilled that Mozilla finally got their sh!t together when it comes to performance in Firefox, with the initial release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017. This was one of the first times since 2010 where I had a somewhat solid argument to convince Chrome users to consider Firefox again. Personally however, I was stuck on pre-quantum Firefox up until 2019 due to my reliance on Quicksaver’s “Tab Groups” extension (the successor to the Panorama feature), which eventually got succeeded by Drive4ik’s “Simple Tab Groups” extension, which is an absolute must-have; if you’re a chaos warrior, use it—you’ll thank me later.
  • Participated in various Montréal urban design public consultation events, such as this one.
  • Went to FOSDEM for the first time. It was cold and wet, and I did not see any talks, but I did see Adrien Plazas and made him wear a horribly obnoxious blue shirt. In his presence, I discovered the marvel that are lambic beers, pretty much the only beer I ever liked in my life. How the rest of the world accepts drinking any other type of alcoholic beverage is beyond me. Sorry, Red Hatters, but the Starobrno doesn’t come anywhere close.
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