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Coronavirus

You know the one
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Coronavirus github.com

A bot to notify you when vaccine appointments are available

Supports checking Hy-Vee, Cosentino’s stores (KC), Ball’s stores (KC), Rapid Test KC, and locations checked by VaccineSpotter (including Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Costco).

Supports sending notifications to Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Twilio, and Twitter.

Notifications are sent when a location has appointments. No more notifications are sent for that location until it becomes unavailable again.

Mozilla Icon Mozilla

Significant changes at Mozilla Corporation

Today Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, shared news of big changes taking place at Mozilla in the wake of COVID-19. In addition to the changes noted below, Mozilla is also laying off 250 employees while it makes these changes.

…going forward we will be smaller. We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively. We’ll meet people where they are. We’ll become great at expressing and building our core values into products and programs that speak to today’s issues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek openness, decency, empowerment and common good in online life.

This internal document includes the details about the restructuring and other specifics.

I’ve reached out to Mitchell via LinkedIn messages to invite her on The Changelog for deep dive into the future of the internet. If you or anyone you might know has a direct connection to Mitchell, please pass this invitation on to her — we’d love to have her on the show.

Feross Aboukhadijeh virus.cafe

Virus Cafe: Make a friend in 2 minutes

Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers.

Here’s how it works:


  1. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat
  2. You’re given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes!
  3. The only rule is: no small talk!

Small talk is the worst and I’m on a mission to eradicate it. I’ve expertly crafted over 200 questions designed to stimulate good conversation and skip past the boring introductions.

Here are a few samples:

  • When in your life have you been the happiest?
  • What would you be willing to die for?
  • What is the biggest lie you’ve told without getting caught?
  • What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?
  • What human emotion do you fear the most?
  • If a family member murdered someone, would you report them to the police?
  • What absolutely excites you right now?

I hope you use Virus Cafe to meet a new friend and make a deep connection today.

Matt Mullenweg ma.tt

On distributed work: gradually, then suddenly

Matt Mullenweg:

The two main theses of my professional career have been that distributed is the future of work, and that open source is the future of technology and innovation.

On the distributed front, the future of work has been arriving quickly. This week, a wave of companies representing over $800B in market capitalization announced they’re embracing distributed work beyond what’s required by the pandemic…

Change happens slowly, then all at once.

There are few people on Earth that have been thinking about this longer (and more deeply) than Matt.

Tobias Lütke Twitter

"Office centricity is over."

This thread from Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) on Twitter…talks about digital by default, a unified work experience, WFH setup, empathy, company culture, change, and silver linings.

As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.

Until recently, work happened in the office. We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup.

He goes on to say…

We haven’t figured this whole thing out. There is a lot of change ahead, but that is what we’re good at. “Thrive on change” is written on our (now digital) walls for a reason.

Sid Sijbrandij changelog.com/posts

Family and friends first, work second

Behind the scenes we heard about Sid’s idea of “family and friends first,” so we asked him to share the idea with our audience and how it’s being embraced at GitLab. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Founders Talk with Sid. I’m sure we’ll touch on this idea and more._

Even at GitLab, we’ve seen increased productivity as the number of merge requests for both March and April exceeded February’s numbers. But as company leader, I don’t see this as something to tout. This new normal is anything but normal, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. Even though GitLab has always been remote and experienced less of a transition than most other companies, our team members are not immune to the stressors of quarantine. Overworking or maintaining the status quo during a crisis is not a badge of honor. In fact, I would be prouder if more employees were taking time off to reset and refresh or spend time adjusting to this “new normal” with their families.

Opensource.com Icon Opensource.com

The real impact of canceling PyCon due to COVID-19

An interview with Ewa Jodlowska on how the Python Software Foundation is responding to the cancelation of in-person events.

Turns out ~63% of the PSF’s 2020 revenue was projected to come from PyCon. That’s a massive hit to take. Read the entire interview to learn what they’re doing to diversify, some silver linings that have come from this, and how you can pitch in.

(The tail end of Adam’s conversation with Duane O’Brien focused on the FOSS Responders initiative which was purpose-built to help out orgs like the PSF.)

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #392

Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund

Duane O’Brien (head of open source at Indeed) joined the show to talk about their FOSS Contributor Fund and FOSS Responders. He’s super passionate about open source, and through his role at Indeed Duane was able to implement this fund and open source it as a framework for other companies to use. We talk through all the details of the program, its impact and influence, as well as ways companies can use the framework in their organization. We also talk about FOSS Responders an initiative to support open source that has been negatively impacted by COVID-19.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #391

Work from home SUPERCUT

Today we’re featuring conversations from different perspectives on working from home from our JS Party, Go Time, and Brain Science podcasts here on Changelog.com. Because, hey…if you didn’t know we have 6 active podcasts in our portfolio of shows. Head to changelog.com/podcasts to collect them all!

Practical AI Practical AI #86

Exploring the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Daniel and Chris have a timely conversation with Lucy Lu Wang of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence about COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). She relates how CORD-19 was created and organized, and how researchers around the world are currently using the data to answer important COVID-19 questions that will help the world through this ongoing crisis.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #390

Visualizing the spread of Coronavirus

Harry Stevens is a Graphics Reporter at The Washington Post and the author of “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to ‘flatten the curve’” — the most popular post in The Washington Post’s online history.

We cover the necessary details of this global pandemic, the journalist, coding, and design skills required to be a graphics reporter, the backstory on visualizing this outbreak, why Harry chooses R over Python, advice for aspiring graphics reporters, and how all of this came together at the perfect time in history to give Harry a chance to catch lightning in a bottle.

Jack McKew jackmckew.dev

Simulating a virus outbreak with JavaScript

Jack builds on this post from Harry Stevens on The Washington Post to create an interactive virus outbreak simulator with JavaScript, HTML5, and Canvas. It simulates the effectiveness of lockdowns, social distancing, PPE, and more. Jack shares the code too.

This post will simulate how viruses can spread throughout a community and implement a variety of different parameters to see how these affect the simulation.

Simulating a virus outbreak with JavaScript

Brain Science Brain Science #15

Working from home

Given all of the recent changes and adjustments many individuals have made to working remotely, Mireille and Adam discuss some of the relevant aspects of working from home. How do you develop habits that work for you to be the most productive? Which factors make a difference to be successful in navigating challenges that emerge and how can you develop ways of staying socially connected while being physically distant?

Practical AI Practical AI #84

COVID-19 Q&A and CORD-19

So many AI developers are coming up with creative, useful COVID-19 applications during this time of crisis. Among those are Timo from Deepset-AI and Tony from Intel. They are working on a question answering system for pandemic-related questions called COVID-QA. In this episode, they describe the system, related annotation of the CORD-19 data set, and ways that you can contribute!

Go Time Go Time #123

WFH

Working from home can be challenging, especially amid school closings and everything else caused by COVID-19. In this episode panelists Jon, Mat, Carmen, and Mark share advice and experiences they have accumulated over many years of working from home. They cover separating your work space from your personal space, signaling to your family that you are busy, ways to keep track of the time, and suggestions for getting some exercise in when you can.

Go blog.golang.org

Go and the Go community during this pandemic

In this post Carmen Andoh, Russ Cox, and Steve Francia share important notes about how the pandemic is affecting the Go community, what they’re doing to help, what you can do to help, and upcoming plans for Go itself.

Go always comes second to more basic concerns like personal and family health and safety. Around the world, the past couple months have been terrible, and we are still at the start of this awful pandemic. There are days when it seems like working on anything related to Go should be considered a serious priority inversion.

But after we’ve done all we can to prepare ourselves and our families for whatever is coming, getting back to some approximation of a familiar routine and normal work is a helpful coping mechanism. In that spirit, we intend to keep working on Go and trying to help the Go community as much as we can.

O'Reilly Media Icon O'Reilly Media

O’Reilly Media shuts down in-person events division

From Laura Baldwin (President, O’Reilly Media):

Today, we’re sharing the news that we’ve made the very difficult decision to cancel all future O’Reilly in-person conferences and close down this portion of our business. Without understanding when this global health emergency may come to an end, we can’t plan for or execute on a business that will be forever changed as a result of this crisis.

…and they are making the move to online-only.

…we believe the stage is set for a new normal moving forward when it comes to in-person events. We also know we are poised to accept that challenge, having already delivered a version of our Strata event on-line to over 4600 participants last week. With over 5000 companies and 2.5 million users on our learning platform, we look forward to innovating and bringing together the technology communities and businesses we serve in new and creative ways.

Data visualization gabgoh.github.io

An interactive epidemic calculator

This calculator lets you tweak things like R0, incubation time, and hospitalization rate to see how affect the results. From the author:

At the time of writing, the coronavirus disease of 2019 remains a global health crisis of grave and uncertain magnitude. To the non-expert (such as myself), contextualizing the numbers, forecasts and epidemiological parameters described in the media and literature can be challenging. I created this calculator as an attempt to address this gap in understanding.

An interactive epidemic calculator

Harry Stevens washingtonpost.com

Extensive social distancing helps to 'flatten the curve'

Graphics reporter Harry Stevens from The Washington Post helps us see the impact of “social distancing” with this coronavirus simulator. He shows the effects of four simulations — a free-for-all, an attempted quarantine, moderate social distancing, and extensive social distancing.

Harry goes on to say, “moderate social distancing will usually outperform the attempted quarantine, and extensive social distancing usually works best of all.”

To simulate more social distancing, instead of allowing a quarter of the population to move, we will see what happens when we let just one of every eight people move.

Extensive social distancing helps to 'flatten the curve'
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