Health

I’m on day 4 of my desperately needed summer vacation1, and twice already I got pinged on my personal social media accounts about OctoPrint related stuff. This happens on every vacation that I take, and during shorter breaks like weekends or just after hours as well, so much so that I’ve pinned a post about it to my Mastodon account (that now also cross references this very blog post): Gina Häußge @foosel@chaos.social Friendly reminder: This is my private Mastodon account which I also want to be able to read after work, during the weekends & other time off without getting dragged back into work 😉 ...

I originally published this in October 2020 as a Twitter thread. Even though it’s been a couple of years, the points still stand, so I decided to preserve it here as a short blog post. It’s easy to only see the success and also to only share the success in our journeys. But success is usually just the end of a long path of struggle, compromises, setbacks, failure. Over the years, I’ve talked about my journey a lot. About the kind of measures I took and continue to take to protect my physical and mental health from the effects of running a project like OctoPrint. ...

I’ve been having knee issues all my life. I can’t remember a time when the occasional pain, stiffness and crunchy noises in both knees weren’t part of my regular experience. The past three years however the left knee got a ton worse, frequently hurting for days on end, getting hot, and overall just being a literal pain. That is why earlier this year I finally decided, enough is enough, got another opinion from my orthopedist and we scheduled a key hole surgery to fix what was suspected to be a very active plica syndrome. This surgery happened on September 20th and it made me learn a LOT about myself. ...

I’ve been working full time from my home office since mid-2014 now. At the time of writing this post this is nearing 7 years. Naturally, considering how much time I spend there, I’ve also spent a lot of thought and money on making sure my workplace helps to keep the usual side effects of the mostly sedentary lifestyle of a developer at bay. Over the years I’ve had some run ins with RSI and backpain. My first wrist issues developed more than 10 years ago. Pain in my lower back beyond “all fine again after a good night’s sleep” started in February of 2014. Both have been repeating visitors since then. You can probably imagine that that has led to a lot of research and experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t for me. So, here’s a summary of my findings as of March 2021. Quick disclaimer though, this is what has proven to work for me, that doesn’t mean it will work for you, if in doubt please consult a professional. Also, I do link to some products here – consider those references to give you more details on my setup, not official endorsement or anything like that. ...