Staying connected despite COVID-19

As we all know it, life has been transformed dramatically in the past months due to COVID-19. As a more significant number of us stayed home to control the spread of the virus, we used different ways to stay connected with close family and friends. From maintaining social connections with others to sending our co-workers emails. In this age of uncertainty, when we isolate ourselves, our friendships and communication are an essential part of our lives — we need to stay together and keep talking about how we feel with our closest friends.

The need for physical contact makes many of us feel socially isolated in these challenging times. We are human beings. Our interaction with other people enables us to survive. And research has shown that people who participate in meaningful, productive, and social activities generally live longer, have a sense of purpose, and maintain a better understanding of humor.

Globally, the response of COVID-19 is focused mainly on social distancing. There is a big difference between the two perspectives, physical deviations do not prevent social communication, and social inevitability inevitably takes a toll.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, life has been challenging and complex; I had many problems connecting with my friends and, most significantly, my close family members. As the pandemic grew denser, the issues of social and economic inequality grew more challenging and made the management of the rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide more tedious. I remember reading about the emergence of discrimination, especially for people from Asia, in Western émigré communities.

For me, I am a programmer. And it was tough for me to communicate with my group members. Before the COVID-19, it used to be a bit easier because we were all in the same place. I would sit with my friend at the computer table, and we would alternate the roles of writing and reviewing and them at some random time and take breaks. It didn’t bother us because we still got a good amount of work done, worked together, and communicated relatively well thanks to direct communications.

The COVID-19 transformed a lot of things for us. I’ve done a lot of projects at home instead of in school. Since March, when we all left school, working pairing with other members proved to be a whole different experience. We will use Google Chat video calls, and half the time, we end up not talking or even hearing each other due to delays and lags in the calls.

We also didn’t have a proper outline of doing anything remotely. A typical day would be like one of us to fire up our IDE(Integrated development environment) and share their screens on Google Chat with the code reviewer.

We all used Visual Studio Code, which had excellent support for remote collaboration like LiveShare. One major thing that helped us was LiveShare on VS Code. For developers, LiveShare allows us to work on our codes interactively and see what others are also working on. Initially, even LiveShare had some bugs. For example, I can remember vividly in a remote session, when one of us attempts to join, they wouldn’t be able to run the tests or see the tests running. This caused a bit of a problem before resolving it a few months later.

So we had a Google Meet meeting on optimizing our pairing time, so it doesn’t just get wasted on fighting with bugs now and then. And we even created a process to make our remote pairing more practical and effective. We only pair on significant pieces of work and when possible. We realized that remote work increased our video chat time quite a lot and some of us had capped data plans. So we don’t want to burn people out with long remote coding sessions if we don’t need to. Having optimized that, we could finally be more efficient in doing.

I felt that memes motivated many of us and kept us connected during the pandemic. We need to laugh, even during the worst of times. In most cases, amusement is not meant to curb misfortune or suffering — it’s a way to ease out stress. And over the past few months, our pandemic-stricken world has been spinning out of control. Even though we cannot visit restaurants or hang out with our friends, we can commiserate online and share our favorite memes while we’re busy scrolling. Unsurprisingly, most memes in the shadow of COVID-19 have been tinged with a particular desperate comedy.

Memes convey that this is a good or bad time for a person; no one is beyond frustration. After school, I am often okay with relaxing to scroll through some memes and feel the disappointment going away. And when you consider a lot of things you would have to miss due to COVID-19, it could leave you feeling worthless and frustrated. Therefore, it is helpful to check our friends no matter where they fall in the social sphere and share media across groups.

Many of my friends were fed up with the COVID-19 situation for various reasons. So for me, it is essential that I first got rid of all the problems I had during the first few months, which helped me. Chatting with my friends about these things enabled them to work through their emotions. And by doing so, the pressure got reduced.

Despite all coronavirus trauma, I would encourage people to see the benefits of what is the “new normal.” Not everyone wants or can use smartphones and computers to communicate with others. But there are still ways you can connect without using any digital technology. Since technology is a way to bring us together, we may feel overwhelmed. That’s why it’s important to remember to make your boundaries and stick to them. Be aware of how you think and make sure you still have enough time to recover and relax. Listen to your body and schedule time to take care of yourself again.