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.

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.

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.

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic and a national emergency here in the United States as well as many other countries around the world, it would be extremely difficult to have a serious conversation here on Brain Science that’s not colored by today’s very serious events. Mireille and Adam discuss the anxiety, fear, and panic that many may be facing. How do we navigate the unseeable unknown? How should we respond to change and the state of the world we are now living in?

Don’t panic. Prepare for change. Be adaptable. Be resilient.

Fantastic read. Hear from Seth on his thoughts on organizing, being productive, and shipping work that is important enough.

When I think about organizing I think about two things: who’s it for and what’s it for? To answer the first question: it’s for you.

To answer the second question, usually people say: it’s to lower the noise level in your own head.

And I think that definitely makes sense for some people.

But lowering the noise level is just not something I need. I need the noise. If there isn’t noise, I make some.

I’m bracing for turbulence. To me, that doesn’t mean panic — it means prepare for change and potentially discomfort as a result of that change. Be adaptable.

This is the note the Sequoia Capital team sent to its founders and CEOs last week to provide guidance on how to ensure the health of their business while dealing with potential business consequences of the spreading effects of the Coronavirus.

Coronavirus is the black swan of 2020. Some of you (and some of us) have already been personally impacted by the virus. We know the stress you are under and are here to help. With lives at risk, we hope that conditions improve as quickly as possible. In the interim, we should brace ourselves for turbulence and have a prepared mindset for the scenarios that may play out.

It will take considerable time — perhaps several quarters — before we can be confident that the virus has been contained. It will take even longer for the global economy to recover its footing. Some of you may experience softening demand; some of you may face supply challenges. While The Fed and other central banks can cut interest rates, monetary policy may prove a blunt tool in alleviating the economic ramifications of a global health crisis.

We suggest you question every assumption about your business…

If you have BI Prime, then read this too.

What do you do when you’ve determined you can’t refactor your way to greatness? For us, we knew where we needed to be, but the application architecture challenges we were facing seemed to be pointing us towards fully replatforming 😱. We had to get creative…

Chris is pumping out a ton of ideas on LinkedIn and his company blog on the topic of remote work.

Unshackling people from sitting in a pollution emitting metal box for 2 hours a day commuting to a distraction factory adult kids club where you waste your days not doing anything and padding out an 8 hour day before you go home and have no time left.

The office is great because of reasons that have nothing to do with work. Remote is great because you get work done while living your life.

Millions of people are about to realize how much easier it is to do great work quicker when you’re not in an office, which is going to make it incredibly difficult to go back to the office.

Matt Mullenweg, on the potential industry-changing affect that Coronavirus is having:

This is not how I envisioned the distributed work revolution taking hold.

For those asking for tips, my Distributed Podcast has a wealth of advice and stories about how we operate. But here are four good ones to start with

TLDR: Minimize real-time meetings, invest in audio/video quality (yes!), your blog is your new office, and chat tools like Slack and Matrix are a must-have.

This interactive dashboard was created by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University to visualize and track reported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in real time. The data collected and displayed are freely available on GitHub.

Below are a few notable pull-quotes from this correspondence on The Lancet’s Infectious Diseases journal.

The dashboard, first shared publicly on Jan 22, illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds.

The dashboard reports cases at the province level in China; at the city level in the USA, Australia, and Canada; and at the country level otherwise. During Jan 22–31, all data collection and processing were done manually, and updates were typically done twice a day, morning and night (US Eastern Time). As the outbreak evolved, the manual reporting process became unsustainable…

Given the popularity and impact of the dashboard to date, we plan to continue hosting and managing the tool throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 outbreak and to build out its capabilities to establish a standing tool to monitor and report on future outbreaks.

For more updates and resources follow Lauren Gardner on Twitter or read the readme.

Mireille and Adam discuss the power of choice as it relates to our locus of control, decision making, and the changes we want to make in our lives. Emotions play a role in decision making as do our values and the perceived payout. When we are aware of the choices we make, we have the capacity to change them and henceforth, the direction of our lives, and the way we feel.

I absolutely loved this piece by Cedric Chin about games and their metagames. Fascinating stuff to think about.

Every sufficiently interesting game has a metagame above it. This is the game about the game. It is often called ‘the meta’.

I’m a fan of games (who isn’t?), and every game I’ve ever really gotten obsessed with has had an even more interesting meta. Oh, and if you’re looking for some kind of a direct link to software development, here you go:

My closest cousin is a software engineer. Recently, his frontend engineering team hired a former musician: someone who had switched from piano to JavaScript programming with the help of a bootcamp. He noticed immediately that her pursuit of skills (and the questions she asked) were sharper and more focused than the other engineers he had hired. He thought her prior experience with climbing the skill tree of music had something to do with it.

Everyone eventually quits. So, what kind of quitter are you? Are you a bridge burner, the 2-week lame duck, or a generative quitter?

Here’s what Dave Evans, co-founder of Stanford Life Design Lab, has to say about quitting.

Whether your next quit is years away or you wish it were tomorrow—there is no avoiding it. You are going to be a quitter. What kind of quitter, though, is all up to you.

The two most common types of quitter are the Bridge Burner and the 2-Week Lame Duck. But we have a radical third option—the Generative Quitter.

But what’s this Generative Quitter about?

The Generative Quitter is a radical third option. Most people think of quitting as a negative, destructive thing. It means leaving, ending, bailing out. But quitting is also the critical turning point between finishing well and starting anew. Let’s re-frame quitting into a chance to refresh and renew things for the company and a chance for you to author a great final chapter of your old job en route to a great next job.

Jared Nelsen tells a story that we’re all too familiar with. Nothing new there, but the analysis and concluding thoughts are worth sticking around for. My favorite:

There is a fundamental mismatch between the public square’s claim that companies are absolutely desperate to hire software engineers and the brutal reality of being a software engineering candidate. These do-or-die high pressure coding challenges seem like more of a hazing mechanism rather than a valuable evaluation tool. Using them is like hiring a police officer by shooting at him before you ask him what he knows about the law.

I love projects like these that push the boundary of what we consider art.

Aleksandr Krivoshchekov implements a factorial function in different ways as if he was at different stages of Go enlightenment. Stick around to the end for a cheeky Rob Pike moment.

In 2009 I started the Alan Turing petition. Perhaps you read about in WIRED back in 2014. This is my first-hand account of how I started the petition, automated my father with Perl scripts, convinced the UK to apologise to Alan Turing, and received a personal phone call from the British Prime Minister.

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Mireille and Adam discuss shame as an emotional and experiential construct. We dive into the neural structures involved in processing this emotion as well as the factors and implications of our experience of shame. Shame is a natural response to the threat of vulnerability and perception of oneself as defective or inherently “not enough.”

Anders Damsgaard is a climate science researcher working on cryosphere processes at the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University. He joined the show to talk with us about the intersection of open source and climate science. Specifically, we discuss a set of shell tools he created called The Scholarref Tools which allow you to perform most of the tasks required to gather the references needed during the writing phase of an academic paper. We also discuss climate science, physics, self hosting Git, and why Anders isn’t present on any “social” networks.

The future of work is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The folks at Ars have been living it (to one degree or another) for two decades. In this epic post, Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson walks us through how they do what they do.

But why?

Little bored. Not learning as much as I used to. I’ve been doing the same thing too long and need a change. It’d be nice to primarily work in Go rather than work on Go.

When I first joined Google it was a chaotic first couple years while I learned Google’s internal codebase, build system, a bunch of new languages, Borg, Bigtable, etc. Then I joined Android it was fun/learning chaos again. Go was the same when I joined and it was a new, fast-moving experiment. Now Go is very popular, stable…

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

Chris Coyier:

The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.

I prefer JAMstack, myself, but I think the Ajax analogy he quotes is an apt one. Aside: if this trend continues, Chris and the team might need to rename the site to “Jamstack-Tricks” soon.

Oh, and while we’re here: It’s Changelog not ChangeLog 😄

Mireille and Adam dig deeper into empathy as a construct. What key brain structures are involved? How can we better understand empathy to be able to better navigate ourselves and our relationships with others both at home and in the workplace?