“We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again. But for now, I send my thanks and warmest good wishes to you all.” -Queen Elizabeth II
As mentioned last week, the newsletter is going on a hiatus. I’m not sure for how long, but it will be a while.
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I was going to make a list of things you could learn this week but, the tech world got a notable call to arms this week. We need more COBOL developers in the US. The glut of unemployment claims has crippled mainframe systems designed to run in a satisfactory government manner under normal conditions. “The governor of New Jersey just put out the call on live TV that he is desperate for Cobol programmers right now.
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There was some discussion in the DevOps’ish Telegram about what the topic of this intro should be this week. One suggestion was excellent; I’m probably going to run with it next week. But, I understand that there are some of you looking for something to learn while we’re in this odd time. I wrote this week’s newsletter with that in mind. If you don’t know git, now is the time to learn for sure.
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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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