Hey friends,
Hope everything is well!
For a while now, it has felt like there’s been two groups of people. Those who are experiencing the quarantine by working from home and those who are experiencing the quarantine with an involuntary loss of income. For the latter, the world of 3.5% unemployment seems like eons ago. It was just February.
In my own spheres, I’ve heard so many stories of people who have experienced layoffs or had offers rescinded. Those are gut-wrenching experiences.
But there’s a cohort of people that I’m currently concerned about - and that’s students who have had their internships cancelled. While an internship isn’t nearly as essential as a job, it is something that is harder to replace. If your summer internship disappears just one month before it starts, then there’s not enough time to find another one. You’re out of luck.
For Software Mentor, I’ve been shifting my focus from junior devs with full time jobs to would-be interns who lost their summer roles. It’s extremely early, but I’m putting together a weekly cadence of check-ins, office hours, and presentations for interns who are building summer projects instead. Essentially, trying to give interns a fraction of the mentorship they would have gotten on the job.
If you know a college student who’s looking to build something this summer, please consider sending them this Google Form: https://forms.gle/F81yQZazTN3cpskv6
Change Log
Last week Phil ran a couple of experiments for Software Mentor. The first was a semi-dramatized retelling/technical deep dive of Square’s Authentication Outage in 2017. The second was advertising on Dev.to. Both were mild successes
Nick is now basically a full stack engineer who also knows how to do iOS and writes clean code in every language he uses (🦄). He’s getting close to an MVP of an Auth API for applications needing a login flow.
Miscellaneous
💨 This weekend, I read the old story of Xanadu, a 40+ year vaporware project that spawned the terms hyperlink and transclusion. It’s a fascinating read that spawns motifs and topics like:
Vision vs Execution
How do we manage information overload?
Feature Creep vs Shipping
Is an opportunity a call to adventure or a siren song?
Building on top of Tech Debt
Tribalism in the software development process (in every project with at least 5 people, it always seems that 2 camps seem to emerge…)
Vertically Integrated Solution vs Best of Breed
Frauds vs Geniuses
🌏💸 An interesting Planet Money podcast came out highlighting some unusual things that are doing well during the coronavirus:
Goat2Meeting - for a fee, Sweet Farm animal sanctuary will crash your video conference with a goat attendee. Raminders is proud.
Trampolines - parents looking for way to entertain their kids have turned to trampolines
Elastic - for the engineers reading this, no, not like ElasticSearch, or even ElasticLoadBalancer, but the good ol’ elastic that you have in your socks. With face mask demand now at an all time high, so too is demand for elastic.
COBOL - guess what happens when millions of people attempt to file for unemployment claims? A COBOL system needs a wranglin’. Enter the COBOL Cowboys, a COBOL consultancy in Texas 🤠
Stay safe, and look out for each other! This could be a rocky ride.
Phil