Most all of my programming work over the years has been at home. The only office work I did was in the 1990s and there I was managing projects and programming teams. But when I was hired to work in-house for the company I had done contract work I was hired as a technical director and not as a programmer. One of my first tasks turn out to be bringing some programmers who worked at home in-house. They were having problems doing remote work and one was remarked how happy he was to be brought into the office.

Working at home isn’t easy for some. It takes certain discipline. But there are a few tricks for it. When I worked at home I always took care of any errands, exercise, etc at the start of the day. This way none of these things like grocery shopping or going for my walk didn’t hang over my head as a distraction while I tried to work.

Now, this might be more difficult for someone in a family situation but another trick is to know when to end the day before you burn out. It is counter productive to push yourself beyond your limits. So folks with families I knew who worked at home set it up so they were done in time to spend the evening with their family.

Of course you probably need to let managers know about schedule and they will need to adjust for it finding you are not available at 9 AM but try anytime after 1 PM. One other thing about doing this given some of the commutes people face these days is you will be fresh when you start work and not worn out from a morning commute. That leads to more productivity.

The 3 people who are probably reading this site may have noticed that there is now a “padlock” showing (depending on browser) along with the site address (URL). Yes I finally got around to making this a “secure” site not that it needed it because here is no login or much of anything else that needed it. But I figured as long as “Let’s Encrypt” SSL certificates are free I might as well do it. Why pay my hosting service to run a script to do that? Of course their certificates are good for a year and the free ones only 90 days but the certificate provider I used will email you in advance of the expiration of the certificate so it may be updated for another 90 days.

About the only thing that needed fixing here was the URL reference in the config file change to HTTPS and once that was done and the site generated all pages with the old URL reference were updated.

One of the reasons I got around to this was a need for support form in the apps I sell. Would you believe I get this emails saying “the app don’t work”? So which app? Which platform? The support form is a web page on my hosting site. It worked from a webview flawlessly unless I wanted to publish the app. Then it threw a CLEARTEXT exception. This on Android and iOS just won’t show the page. Best solution was to make the domain that page was on SSL. That took care of the problem.

That page grabs the app name, version and platform version and includes it in the email which is sent to me. So no need to ask back “which app and which platform?” Apparently some of my customers thought I was more psychic than I am.