A year ago, I had the hope that with the COVID vaccine we are back in something called “normal” by summer. For a few weeks it looked like this could be true before it turned for the worse. While writing this post Switzerland starts the Omicron wave at the high point of our 5th wave (driven by Delta). And yet, as so often in the past two years, the situation around us seams to go unnoticed by the authorities. There is still a strong hybris that we are better and that our measures are sufficient.
Let’s hope for the best but prepare for a more realistic scenario. Put your mask on – so that it covers your mouth and your nose at the same time…
2021 brought some interesting changes for me. I switched jobs and work now for the Swiss Institute of Medical Education in the medical informatics team. For the most part, I do the same work as before, but without spending all my energy manoeuvring around the trenches between the two companies. I will need this saved energy to build the interesting projects that are in our pipeline. If it works out, there will be a lot of material for talks and blog posts.
We could finally ship our big application to the doctors. At the first day more than 600 doctors entered their data on the new platform with only a small number of support requests. After three months we can say the release was a success and nearly all problems got solved within hours of their discovery.
The internal part of our application was already 2 years in production. We made a big makeover to handle the new structures and to clean-up the user interface. The effort to automate the boring stuff was time well spend and we could replace nearly all parts with our new concepts in just a few weeks.
This allowed us to put the Vue.js application into early retirement and replaced it with a Blazor application. The big benefit for us is that we can use C# for 99% of the application and only need a tiny layer of JavaScript. This allows all developers to make changes in a safe and reliable way. Blazor and .Net 5 are fast enough for us but we are looking forward to getting even more speed with .Net 6.
This blog grows organically and 2021 will end with a record of more than 560’000 page views. I kept blogging twice a week and with all the ideas I have, I will keep writing at this rate for the bigger part of 2022.
I wish all readers good luck for 2022. I fear we are going to need it.