The coronavirus pandemic has been tough for all of us. We were forced to isolate ourselves from each other, to protect our lives and other's from a tiny but deadly creature called as Covid-19. And while the impact of the virus and lockdown solution has been mostly negative, I thought it would be better if we focus on the positive effect it had provided us instead.

Opportunity to gain more knowledge

If you think about it, before the pandemic hits us most of our time are wasted on everyday preparations and commute. Our daily routinary was to wake up at 6 am, brush our teeth, cook food, feed our dog or cat, eat, take a bath, brush our teeth, put our favorite clothes on and then we realized it's already 8 o'clock and we're late. So we rush outside to ride in a transport that can safely bring us to our offices. Of course with our classic frustrated faces because we are late at work (which is our fault) and that the vehicle we are on seems to be moving like Gary from Spongebob.

That's a lot of time wasted. Not to mention the journey we take after our hard work at the office.

Very nostalgic right? Crazy how it's been just last year since we were at that system. Everything was so sudden and for sure no one was prepared for all of it. That tiny little creature that we all fear must be so happy that it succeeds in its mission.

So my point is, that's about 4 hours wasted on preparations and commute. And with the imposed lockdown, one positive effect it has given us is an extra 4 hours of spare time. Which means an opportunity that we can utilize.

Last year my goal was to improve my front-end skills. So what I did was I tried to consume as much knowledge as I can with the available time that I have. I set aside at least 3 hours of my everyday time on learning TailwindCSS, React and NextJS. And I've used those three frameworks in building this blog. I've also taken a refresher course on Algorithms and Data Structures from MIT. All of those lessons are free.

I've been using Laravel as my back-end stack for a long time. One reason why I love Laravel is that it's so developer-friendly. The syntax, eloquent ORM, and authentication scaffold, etc... are all easy to learn. But it's purely server-side so every route that the user goes to will perform a full-browser refresh. So I looked for an alternative tool to use with Laravel. At first, I tried to learn Livewire as my full-stack framework but eventually, I decided to switch to React because of the massive community it has. Another reason why I chose React instead of Livewire is because of InertiaJS. What InertiaJS does is that it's an adapter that sits in the middle and connects two entirely different frameworks. It makes it easy to pass data from the server-side (Laravel) into the client-side (React) without the need for an API.

Opportunity to share knowledge

This year I wanted to do something different. I decided to start a blog. Initially, I had a lot of doubts about putting the effort into writing blog posts. Would anyone read the blog? Will I be able to share something useful? What if I shared something that's already there? Am I in the authority to share these things? Those typical thoughts of insecurities and self-doubts we cause ourselves that prevents us from doing amazing things.

While I was planning this blog I was occupied with a million different factors. Who will be my target audience? What is this blog going to look like? What frameworks/libraries should I use? What content should I share? How do I organize the contents? So much decision fatigue.

Eventually, I decided: fuck it, ship it. And now we're here. I still think that this blog looks like shit but if I don't decide right away then I might still be on that phase of arguing to my perfectionist's brain and probably you'll never see this blog ever.

So yeah here I am welcoming you to my personal space of the internet. Where I share and teach you about what I've learned in software development and maybe some learnings I've had with my personal life experiences.

Opportunity to heal our Home

While everyone is complaining about how boring it is to stay at home, our carbon emissions are going down globally. And with manufacturing and air travel grinding to a halt, the planet has had a chance to rejuvenate.

For me, this is one of the biggest positive impact this pandemic had done. Earth's temperature is getting hotter and hotter and we're experiencing some powerful typhoons lately. Also recently, a news came out about a massive iceberg that breaks off from Antartica. That's scary and a cause of concern, right? Maybe this lockdown is necessary to let the Earth breathe a little.

This pandemic has been a frustrating and depressing time for all of us. But I know that we can overcome all of this and eventually we can go back to our normal lives. While we are not there yet let us all use the time that we have to grab all available opportunities. A chance to improve ourselves and a chance to help our Mother Earth.

Anyways, thanks for reading all the way here. Err, I have to go. See you in my next post.