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In dark times, there are typically rays of light that can be found to give us hope. I read an article last weekend that I thought would be worth mentioning here this week. Will the coronavirus crisis, like Sars, give birth to the next big thing in China tech? looks at how the Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com got their start during the SARS crisis of 2002-2003. The coronavirus caused markets to tank this week. But, US banks had plenty of liquidity from the Federal Reserve and capital on hand thanks to regulations passed after the 2008 financial crisis. A global outbreak of this nature will have a significant economic impact. But, there will be some good that comes from this current crisis. One possible example is that a few companies have halted stock buybacks. Stopping stock buybacks might do some good for the economy as companies maintain capital that can be invested in things that will be more impactful during this trying time. Use your time effectively like Isaac Newton did. You might not invent calculus or theories for gravity and motion but, the time you save from commuting might be able to be put to some good use. Keep your heads up. ...

Everything is canceled, postponed, or going virtual. Coronavirus (COVID-19) has already made drastic impacts across the planet. Particularly this week, when several companies restricted travel forcing conferences to do something if they hadn’t already. KubeCon EU is getting pushed back to July or August. I canceled my plans earlier in the week because, with everything up in the air, there’s no telling I’ll be available to participate whenever it does eventually get rescheduled. Since a lot of us are probably stuck at home, I’d like to remind you, I’m always looking for opportunities to sit down and talk to folks from my office. I’ve got the setup for it and have a few upgrades in mind. If you have an idea for a conversation instead of a Meetup, panel, or talk, feel free to reach out. I’m looking for collaborative opportunities. People Don’t Hide Bad News in Times of Crisis Dumbest thing you can do in a crisis is double down on existing decisions. The next dumbest thing is to double down without being transparent about what work is in progress to reassess the situation. ...

The first CNCF Air Gapped Working Group meeting happened this week. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. Air gapped or disconnected environments have a few variants. But, the air gaps I’m most familiar with are those between unclassified and classified US government systems (TEMPEST, EMSEC, COMSEC, etc.). Also, given the attendance, there is a lot of interest from folks across the public and private sectors. If you’re interested in getting involved, we’re figuring out what the cadence of the meetings will be. The current scope of our work is to provide a “cookbook” for maintaining an air gapped cloud native environment. Join the CNCF SIG App Delivery mailing list and keep an eye out for messages to see how to get involved. The 2020 election for the Open Source Initiative Board of Directors is rapidly approaching. I nominated myself for a seat on the board as an Individual Member. I spoke with a few friends in the months before submitting my nomination. It sounds like OSI could use my help given the week they’ve had. Open source software has done nothing but provide opportunity after opportunity in my life. It should be cared for and maintained so that everyone willing can benefit from it as much as I have (hopefully more). If you’re an OSI member, please considering me for a seat on the board. If you’re not an OSI member, you have until 1 March 2020 to join to vote. However, if you work with open source software, you should be an OSI member. ...

I spent this week in Las Vegas, working at IBM’s FastStart 2020 event. The event is for IBM sellers, partners, and technical folks to come to learn the new bits of knowledge about the products they’re selling and enabling at their clients’ sites. I went in my usual technical capacity and learned very quickly IBM and Red Hat speak two different languages. This is expected but, I wanted to look a little further into the why behind that. As a surprise to no one, I found a DevOps parallel here. In DevOps, change starts one of two ways based on the type of change happening. The more natural way (for me) is to start with the teams with their hands on the keyboard doing the work. Talk to them about their problems in their language. Tell them how your tool’s features help to solve their problems. Pull out a laptop and prove to them you’re not full of shit. This is the bottom-up approach to DevOps. It’s an engineer built and run transformation. Leadership stakeholders are updated about results. Leadership buys-in because the results prove themselves. ...

I got up this morning and was quickly exhausted from pain. I had noticed this exhausted feeling earlier in the week. It was the day of a doctor’s appointment to get injections to fix the mentally distracting nature of constant, chronic pain. I discovered burnoutindex.org, which is a nine-question test to give you an idea of your main risk factors of burnout. My two key elements are self-inefficacy and exhaustion (see my burnout report). I’ve proven that this exhausted feeling is a real thing; what do I do about it? According to this, I need to figure out what my sources of energy are and bulk up on them while working to figure out what work-related urgencies are overwhelming. I think my problem is that I feel like I’m often trying to move a celestial body into or out of an orbit. The force, effort, time, and energy this requires is enormous. Of course, if you feel like the weight of the world is on you, exhaustion is a natural outcome. I have to remember that I’m sitting behind a keyboard and that I am only human. Hopefully, this too shall pass. ...