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WDRL 282

Welcome back again, the web has changed, work as well.

Hi, I’m Anselm Hannemann, a freelance Frontend Developer and Engineering Manager. You can hire me. I wrote WDRL for 10 years and have a a Market Garden as a side-business.

Profile photo of the author, Anselm Hannemann

Hey,

Hello my fellow readers! After months of silence I’m back. Since my last update in February a lot has changed, not only in my life but in everyones’. A virus makes us living differently than we are used to and work has changed with it. A lot of people work from home these days, others lost their jobs and many are facing a change of rules in any part of life. Kids can’t go to school, vacation is not allowed for a specific time or in other cases is enforced to use during the calm times.

For myself, my life changed quite a bit in March and April. I started with a new field to grow vegetables nearby in March and it keeps me busy for most of the week right now. It’s a CSA and we can already give ten families including our own nearly enough vegetables for the week with the amount growing every week. In April, my son was born, right in the middle of a weird time that enabled us to welcome him calm and easy to our world.

The Web… where to start? For me, now just watching from outside as I laid down all my jobs during the past months to enjoy family time and do the garden, it felt weird to read about all the technological changes during a virus that changes the lives of many people. On the other hand, life goes on, work goes on, and it’s great to see that some people continue to build amazing things, to make better browsers, to invent technologies and services that help all the other people out there struggling right now.

Our own species to me remains a mystery: While during the crisis and lockdowns, we achieved to lower our greenhouse gas emissions, this quickly goes back or even worse since we “recover” from the lockdowns. I lost my hope that people will fly less now for private and business purposes and may rethink their lives and get on a more sustainable track. I read a lot about how to prevent getting sick, how to stay sane during this heavy, exhausting times and it’s all about your inner peace, about health and about happiness. Many solutions how to achieve it are going outside right where you are, meditate, get rid of stuff you don’t use or need. Most people in my country know less about cities and villages or areas in their own country than in Italy or France or even more abroad. Why is it still not cool to go on vacation in your own country or neighbour country? It takes you only 1 – 3 hours by train instead of a flight that takes 16 hours just to enjoy another beach that’s no different to what you could visit also with a 2 – 3 hours flight. We all watch nature and outdoor adventure documentaries on Netflix but we don’t do it ourselves. I’ve never been truly happier at work than in the past months being outdoors on my field every day, no matter which weather. My back does not hurt anymore, I’m less stressed out and overall way happier. I don’t earn a lot of money right now and we all know that earning money with growing vegetables by hand and with love doesn’t pay a lot of bills. But I decided now that it just needs to pay my bills. I’ll continue to be a freelance developer to earn a baseline of money but splitting my work into two jobs was by far the best I could do for myself lately.

As always, my thoughts are thought as a trigger to you. Disregard it if you don’t want to think about it or don’t have the time right now. Reply to me if you think you want to say something or have a question. Share it, if you think you know someone who would benefit from it or write your own thoughts to the public if you think they’ll benefit others.

News

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UI/UX

Tooling

Security

Web Performance

Accessibility

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CSS

Work & Life

Go beyond…

Thank you all for reading this, I hope you’re doing fine and stay positive, find your way to make an impact and help build a better society, better friendships and make our world a little better. The next edition will hopefully be served to your inboxes way sooner again and I already have a couple of thoughts and links in the queue.

If you want to support my work, you can give back via PayPal or Stripe. Thank you!

Anselm