Gradual Evolution of our Home Office

With Victoria and I both having home offices, Vicky has her Mac for school and work set up in one of our guest rooms while I took over a corner of our master bedroom.  Over the past decade, both of our home offices have continued to evolve to match our needs and style.  With my interests in systems engineering (automated server deployments/administration), programming/scripting, gaming, learning to play the keyboard, and 3D printing, this is how my office looks now.

My cable management has continued to improve since these pictures were taken.  I cleaned up and ran the cables through conduits so it looks more organized and less cluttered.

I still need to drastically clean and re-organize our bedroom so that it’s professional/presentable on video conference calls.  Right now I’ve been relying on Virtual Backgrounds to mask the mess in the background.  Since I don’t want to put a massive 12’x6′ greenscreen in our bedroom, I figure I really need to clean our bedroom this week before I begin my new job in two weeks.

Using my home office itself as my virtual background worked really well so far for the purposes of my technical interviews.  It allowed directors, managers, and other engineers to look over my office while they interviewed me, and I could use objects in it either as ice-breakers or discussion subjects.  I talked about the unicorn and it’s meaning from Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn”, how it helped me through cancer and chemo, and how the IT industry is rife with “unicorns” (indispensable magical creatures who make everything possible, and immediately missed when out sick or on vacation).  I talked about the Apple XServe that the unicorn sits on, and how I have a 12TB Apple Xserve with 96GB memory for the purpose of hosting VMware ESXi for my virtual servers, development, and orchestration/automation of Infrastructure-as-Code.

And so it goes… this is my office, and lately the entirety of my world… since I can’t leave the house between the Coronavirus Pandemic and my own immunocompromised health due to my cancer treatment for Mantle Cell Lymphoma.