How to relief during the pandemic period of time and how Microsoft technologies keep me in shape

Probably, today’s time is harder than ever you have seen and this my personal opinion and story how I survive during this “horrible” time and what I did to give my working time without “downtime”.

Challenge 1 — To find the working place. This is the first time that I wish I had a special working place in my home and I even did not realize that I will work from home on a regular basis. But now, it is new reality of our new style of life. The first task of this challenge is to find the right place to work. I have tried working on the kitchen, living room, on bathroom but it was not comfortable. And boom I found small place under my stairs closer to my WI-FI router. We use this place for keeping unused or not on a regular basis things. Now, I have a place, next step is to assemble equipments like desk and chair. Thanks, I had a desk but a chair, I did not have a special office chair and I solved this issue by buying one. This is a awesome chair — http://ergosit.com.ua. My apologies, I did not find the site in english because this is a Ukrainian brand company, but I think there are similar sites you can find.

Challenge 2 — Regular meeting. I understand it depends on your responsibility or your work but usually I have several customer’s meeting and few ones with my team and for sure I need to have silent room and a tool that I can use to communicate. So, about silent room, you can forget about this option if you have children :) and they stay at home during the qurantine. Second thing is a tool, that is what you can find. At the moment Microsoft provides MS teams for free and it is a nice application for communication (https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free ). Just for now, Microsoft caries about you privacy and sounds quality that why MS teams is updated with new functionality — background effects and remove background noise from calls automatically using artificial intelligence. Microsoft is planning to introduce a new real-time noise suppression feature for Teams meetings later this year. Also, MS teams is also getting an offline mode for reading Teams chat messages and drafting responses when there’s no internet connectivity. You know, all schools are trying to change education period of time and use online for teaching. I think MS teams is a good thing to cover all their needs.

Challenge 3 — To take a break. Working from home you can forget about normal working time (8 hours per day, from 9 am to 6 pm). Well, what I did to solve this problem. I have prepared one IoT device with a simple application that can calculate my working time in the room (I used movement sensor) and remind me to take a break through MS teams or email. For this scenario, I used IoT hub to register my device and Azure App Logic to prepare the workflow. Nice thing that I would like to share is GitHub Free plan for teams. That is awesome to have such tool for team. Few details about it:

• new GitHub Free plan for teams with unlimited collaborators in private repositories, 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes/month, and GitHub Community Support.
• You now have unlimited collaborators in private repositories as part of your GitHub Free plan.
• Monthly pricing for our Pro plan has been reduced from $7/month to $4/month.
• Monthly pricing for our paid Team plan has been reduced from $9/user to $4/user.
• Actions minutes and Packages storage will continue to be free for all public repositories.

More information is here https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github/faq-about-changes-to-githubs-plans?utm_source=announcement&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mnch-free

To be continued …