A New Reality Unfolds

Gosh, it’s complicated. How do I start this post without sounding banal? We’re all confused, aren’t we? Even those who say the Corona hysteria is unjustified. Even those who are relatively safe from contagion. Because no matter if anybody I know gets sick or not - there’s a new reality our there. Something none of us had to deal with before. How will this impact our communities, jobs, businesses, families, money?

Jobs

Regarding jobs - we in IT are relatively ready. There’s this joke circling on Twitter with a computer geek type saying: “So, I need to stay at home and avoid humans? I’ve been preparing for this my whole life!” But as with any behaviour - it’s fun when it’s chosen and much less fun when it’s forced upon us.

We’re in the first week of ubiquitos WFH (Work From Home). Right now it feels like a kind of a blessing. I finally get the time to cater to a multitude of pet projects. Shoot a few videos I’ve had in my head for eternity. Try a few tools I’ve been wanting to check out. Fix some issues in Meshery linkerd adapter that I’ve stumbled upon when shooting this video.

Other Otomato engineers and partners are also quite accustomed to working remotely. We’ve got our Slack, Zoom, hosted repos and cloud accounts, what else do we need. If anything - it currently feels more productive.

Family

It’s actually nice to have kids around the house. We’ve got 2 teenagers and we don’t get to see too much of them. Now suddenly we talk more, hang out together. Watched a charming Miyazaki movie “Kiki’s Delivery Service” on Netflix yesterday. Very much in the spirit of time :)

Money

This is still unclear. There are some deals pending as companies try to understand what’s next. We were in the midst of negotiating classroom trainings, now we need to think if we transfer them to online or wait for better times.

And even though we have probably the best platform for remote technical training in the world from Strigo - for many our customers this isn’t a straightforward decision.

Friends

On some level the globality of this virus outbreak is actually brining people together. In the last week we’ve called up many of our friends in different places in the world who we usually talk to only on special occasions. Japan, Russia, Italy, US - everybody is in the same boat.

Finally

There’s still no ‘finally’ here. Let’s see how the situation unfolds. Right now I’m thinking of sewing my own protection masks. An opprotunity to express my fashion design aspirations :) And what are you up to?