Hey everyone,
great to see these familiar names. I definitely remember you, sitnspin, but I guess that's a bit easier for me, considering I didn't interact with people on this forum for a long time and don't have newer memories than those.
I think I was most active ca. 2012 to 2015 IIRC? Came back in 2018 for a bit. Gosh it feels like a lifetime ago. I hadn't even finished school when I started visiting.
When I came back here I was in a really dark place, and it took me a while to get better. I had a therapy group for a while, struggled a lot when deciding to finally drop out of university and start vocational education (Germany has this system of earning certified job titles through a mixture of a (badly) paid apprenticeship on 3 days of the week and 2 days of vocational school). Usually it takes 3 years, but having been to university allowed me to reduce it to 2, and good grades allowed me to reduce it even further to 1.5.
I wouldn't say I'm in a particularly good place atm, but well, with the pandemic and all, who even is. I'm definitely better though. Looking back on the last few years there's little I'd do differently, because I wouldn't have had the good times without the occasional bad ones, and I feel like that's the important bit.
Currently my main issue is stress. I've been working under extreme pressure over the last 1.5 years. Our company creates software for small to medium sized pharma companies, is way understaffed, and for some reason we took over a project related to a Covid vaccine. I'm not going to say too much about it, but I think I can mention that I've more or less single handedly written the module of our software product which one vaccine manufacturer uses for tracking public requests, but also adverse events and product quality complaints for 2 countries. It's safe to say, I hope I'll never again have to write software which is used to track potentially fatal events. That's not a responsibility I want to have.
But yeah, I think I won't say much more about this, definitely not in the Chatter subforum.
Still: overall I'm better than I was when I last visited, and I hope you're all doing well.
p.s.: Cesium, it really cheered me up to see you're still using the Gordon I've colorised for you as your avatar