Weeks are passing fast! Lockdown could be boring, but our kid is learning so fast at the moment and keeping us very busy, so we don't really see time fly by.

Many colleagues of mine around Texas have been suffering from the winter storm. I really hope that all of them can find their home in a working state again and get access to drinkable water soon. Tough times.

🌳 Sustainability

IBM, my employer, recently announced to be bringing greenhouse gas emissions to a net zero by 2030 - so not by buying certificates but by really avoiding almost all greenhouse gas emissions, and capturing the remainder. I'd been waiting such an announcement for a while, and I'm very happy this is happening. Jim Whitehurst is also very committed to the topic, so hopefully nice side projects will emerge from that to help sustainability in all kinds of context.

📘 Tools

After I submitted a blog post originally written in Markdown that had all kinds of typos, I decided to look if I could fix this in some way. As the VSCode ecosystem seems to be growing to the infinity, of course there was a tool to help! It's called Code Spell Checker, and the nice thing is that it also checks variables and comments. But as a side feature, that means it also can check stuff like HTML content, Markdown or even - surprise! - text files. So yeah, what a useful project. Only 2M downloads 😏

🎶 Music

Already quite a few years ago, I was singing in a university choir. A friend there got us tickets for a concert of Bach's Matthäus Passion in Stuttgart. The concert was incredible. We had sang this piece just around a year earlier, but this was really another level. The conductor was Frieder Bernius, and he is internationally one of the most acknowledged conductors for Bach.

Anyway, recently I was looking for his recordings on Spotify, and they have tons of it. Lockdown will not be long enough to hear all of that. If you are looking for some top quality choir music (there are often bad quality recordings out there), check this.

– Stephane