I've found working from home to be a lot more useful than perhaps I'd ever imagined it to be. 

The routine and flexibility have allowed me to more easily complete my deliverables in many cases (though I do tend to go to be later). For example, I am able to go for runs more routinely, and my days are uninterrupted which helps me concentrate and make productive advances in my work.

Due to these advances, I've very much considering this to be my default modus operandi moving forward and reducing my travel and potentially my rent in the future...

At the moment I'm learning about various design patterns and as part of my ongoing research and even made a foray into Lambda Calculus while reading a paper by Haskell author Paul Hudak written in 1989. I find reading papers to be quite enjoyable, and immersive - particularly as I'm already at home after work with no tiresome commute.

I've realised that I very much like doing investigative work, research or otherwise. Particularly true of debugging in general or any aspect where I need to paint a clear understanding from an otherwise unknown or blurry set of circumstances. I really enjoyed the Digital Forensics course I did for example.

I guess at the heart of it, this is a form of conceptual modelling - piecing together understanding about the unknown. And I think it can be quite a personal thing, and therefor quite rewarding - because you've got to figure out, in your own way how something works ie make it understandable. This can be a very creative process. I find drawing pictures in my notebook the best way to model things and ideas, I'm also quite partial to using my Surface too.

My running has made leaps and bounds, I've increased my fitness to a large extend while under lock-down, which perhaps compensates for the amount that I'm eating too!

I recently I wrote about some aspects of the testing framework in Ruby RSpec let and let! differences which came up during a discussion and have found the platform generally useful. 

I've also been re-writing a prototype game to use Functional programming paradigms and techniques to first show that it can be done, and to document what they are - for purely research basis.

As part of this and other ongoing learning, I've updated my LanguageExt tutorial (which had made it into an arctic vault), so will now be enjoyed for generations to come! It also happens to be its 1st Birthday this month. 

I've added a new use case for demonstrating the Try<T> monad, which is such a useful thing but is something somehow, particularly people I've spoken to about it, haven't appreciated as much.

I've also been prodding around in J2EE code around using RX-Rest, Glassfish, JSF, JPA and EJBs but not in a huge way these days. I'm looking for excuses now.