2021 was quite the year, in that I had my first professional fiction sale! That story is eligible for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award, among others, and is on the Nebula Recommended Reading list.

And, since this is my first pro-market publication, I am eligible for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Update: I am happily employed! I’m leaving this post up as a template for others.

I’m Alice Goldfuss, a Senior SRE/Infra/Systems engineer with years of experience working on high-throughput platforms at scale. I’ve been part of the larger tech community since 2015, and have driven industry-wide conversations around infrastructure design, incident response, on-call rotations, and team workflows. I’m a big believer in building tech that serves real user needs without burning out the engineers creating it.

With the spread of COVID-19, many tech companies are sending employees home to work remotely. As someone who has worked remotely for multiple companies, in different setups, I wanted to offer some assurances and tips for maintaining your mental health while adjusting to this new life.

This is a long post, but I hope it brings you some amount of comfort and support in the days ahead.

This will be a long post, because it was a long year.

I’m a very organized person. I know this because I love lists.

I write lists everywhere. In my notebook, in my Notes app, on empty envelopes, receipts, paper bags. As a kid I would write them on my wrists (my mother hated that). Periodically I compile the lists together, figure out which items to do first, and scribble them out when complete. And I know the system is working because everything gets done, mostly, eventually, at some point.

It doesn’t work very well.