Well, 2020 has gone in interesting directions so far! 🤷🏻♂️
I’m writing this from Hobart, where I live, and am currently self-isolating, after we returned home early from the USA a few weeks. We finished two events — including O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Conference (more on that in a second). After the second event, we found ourselves in Miami with the news that both the Game Developers Conference 2020 and O’Reilly’s Strata Data+AI conference (our next two events) were both cancelled.
With news that the COVID-19 virus was spreading, we sat in a Starbucks and worked with Virgin Australia to get us home. We landed in Melbourne early in the morning of 12 March 2020, arrived in Hobart a few hours later. We’ve been voluntarily self-isolating since then, out of an abundance of caution.
It’s already a bit stressful, but it doesn’t seem like the end is in sight.
A few days ago our publisher O’Reilly Media announced that they were shutting down their in-person events business, and wouldn’t be running conferences any more. This coincided with the positions of many of our friends at O’Reilly being made redundant. We’re pretty shocked, and sad. We’ve been to many, many O’Reilly conferences over the last 15 years, so this is very much the end of an era.
This week also coincides with the end of Jon and myself being employees of Secret Lab for 2 months! We made the change, after planning to do so for more than a year, because of all the upcoming travel we’d had planned, and the amazing opportunities we could see ahead if we worked in the business a little more and differently (more announcements soon!) Well, the travel didn’t pan out, but the employment is going well.
More, hopefully more cheerful, updates soon.
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison 