The impact of the coronavirus hit the tech events industry hard this week. In a shocking move on Tuesday, O’Reilly announced it has immediately ceased all in-person events. To add insult to injury, O’Reilly laid off their entire events staff during a pandemic. To make matters worse, under US law, they’ll get only a week of health insurance benefits, meager support for COBRA (super expensive health insurance), and any severance is based solely on tenure.
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There is a line in Saving Private Ryan about griping. There’s a chain of command in the military and leadership voices its concerns up the chain, never down it. This week, I’ve been reaching up my chain of command in government to make sure that the people that are supposed to be leading right now are. I would encourage you to do the same. Some good news this week is that after announcing an initiative to harness a global computer network to contribute work towards pharmaceutical drugs to combat COVID-19, Folding@Home has seen a 1200% increase in computers actively contributing to the project.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Events February 2020 Michigan Tech Events — If you’re in Michigan this month, check out one of these awesome tech events while you’re here. Also, the Orchestructure meetup is the last Wednesday of the month and is always filled with Kubernetes nerds.
SCALE 18x
March 5-8, 2020
SCaLE 18x – the 18th annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place in March 5-8, 2020, at the Pasadena Convention Center.
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A change at the helms of IBM and Red Hat are occurring in April (IBM press release). Ginni Rometty is retiring (after a short period as Executive Chairman). Ginny is the only woman to have ever led IBM which is a feat all by itself. She had the unenviable job of leading IBM out of its funk too. IBM had really good numbers this quarter. Whether that continues remains to be seen but, it’s noteworthy that it happened under Ginny’s watch.
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On my last trip of 2019, I took a very important walk with a friend. We talked extensively about burnout and recognizing ways to recover and mitigate the stress of our lives. I left the conversation in a much more peaceful place having just talked about. But, I’m not sure my friend did. The other day they sent me a Shonda Rhimes TED Talk that reminded them about my pledge a couple of years ago to say yes to everything I could.
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