Saturday morning, I awoke at 5 AM to pain and an awful headache. I know this headache well; it was a headache from looking at a computer screen too much (after 25 years in the industry, I rarely get these). It was the headache of sitting down before 8:30 AM on Friday, the next time you look up it’s almost 2 PM, and you’ve crossed one thing off your list.
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This week has been quite a blur. Working backward (literally and figuratively), we’re re-entering lockdown as a household again. A visit with my pain management doctor on Thursday in which he told me the hospital we both live near has seen COVID-19 admissions double this week pushed things very front of mind. A statement from our state’s governor on Thursday put things into motion towards lockdown (which she can no longer mandate thanks to our state legislature passing a law preventing her from doing so; nuts, I know).
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I was incredibly busy this week. I spoke at the October 2020 CNCF Eastern Canadian Meetup. I turned the introduction to last week’s newsletter into its own blog post, Fear and Loathing in YAML, and it made the front page of the orange site (you read it here first). And then, of course, all the live streaming for Red Hat.
Speaking of live streaming. When we look back at 2020, it seems like live streaming will be the thing the COVID-19 brought into our daily lives.
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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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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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