Today, after two years of working from home, i returned to office. It feels like time froze here since March 2020.
A lot has changed in the world since then but everything here feels the same. The first thing that i noticed when i entered the office is the familiar aroma of freshly brewed coffee in the air. Tracing the origin of this pleasant odor, i ran into coworkers gathered around the espresso machine chatting while religiously following their pre-work ritual of griding coffee beans for their daily dose of caffeine.
After a bit of repartee, i headed to my desk and on the way, i noticed the desks of former colleagues with name tags still associated with them. Even though its been almost an year since they left the company, their desk is in the same state that they left it before hiberating for the pandemic. My desk was in a similar state. It had notes lying around since 2 years and only by perusing them, I’ve realized how much i’ve grown in the last two years. All those system diagrams of microservices, all the corporate jargon, which felt intimidating back when i started seem almost trivial now. Once you’ve worked on the internals of an abstraction layer, building on top of those abstractions becomes feels natural.