I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m always trying to improve myself. I’ve been trying to find the motivation to write regular blog posts for 2+ years now without much luck. This year I am going to try doing something new, building a new project every month as a motivation to blog about them!

Last weekend I had the pleasure of getting my third COVID Vaccination, a half dose of Moderna as a booster shot to go with my two previous doses of Pfizer. While waiting my turn, I was scrolling through my Instagram discovery page and low and behold, I came across heaps of vaccine misinformation.

With 2020 in the rearview mirror, I wanted to take a few minutes and think about some of the things — content, technology, software, etc. — that I was most thankful for in 2020. It has been a long, stressful, exhausting year, but some great things still came out of it.

What makes a remote development team successful? How can you build a team of employees who work together effectively across continents and time zones—even if they’ve never met? I’ve spent my entire development career working primarily remotely at a huge mix of companies, and in that time I’ve learned a lot about the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches to remote work. For the last three years, I’ve had the pleasure of leading the fully remote development team at SpringboardVR, where I’ve implemented what I consider to be the ideal setup for remote development teams. 

News publications from Forbes to VentureBeat have boasted that 5G is going to be the future of VR. But a lot of people in the industry, including former Oculus CTO John Carmack, have some serious concerns about the impact 5G will actually have on VR. What these publications are boasting is definitely the dream for VR – to use cheaper, slower, less battery-intensive hardware in standalone headsets and handle all the processing for the headsets on a remote server. We could have higher-quality graphics, way better battery life, and a much more immersive experience for a cheaper price. Who wouldn’t want that! But is 5G really the technology that is going to change this for VR?