An offer of help

Firstly, I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy amidst the current pandemic.

The economic impact of COVID-19 will undoubtedly affect you to some extent and I’d like to offer my help however I can. Here are a few ways in which I might be able to help you either over email or perhaps even over a video call:

• Learning Serverless — obvious one first (since this is what you signed up to this mailing for!), but if you now find yourself with more time available to learn more about serverless, then please just hit reply and let me know about any specific questions you have or specific areas you’d like to learn more about. I will be continuing to publish new writing on serverless several times a week. I will make time to reply to every individual email. I also have quite a large backlog of serverless articles that you may wish to check out.
• Building a product or starting/running a small business — In addition to doing serverless consulting, I’ve been running my own SaaS product on AWS for 6 years. If you’re considering going down this route and want to run ideas/get feedback from someone who has trodden this road, please do get in touch.
• Working from home — I’m very lucky in that I’ve been able to work from home for several years, so I can still at least deliver work to clients, even if future business is uncertain. I have also worked with several remote-friendly clients and understand what makes a remote team tick. I’m not going to give you a list of WFH tips as there seems to be a lot of that already available, but if you do have specific questions in this area, please ask me. I would, however, strongly recommend getting a laptop stand to save you from neck-ache.

Help from others

Here are other folks in the tech space that have volunteered to help those struggling during the current pandemic:

• Stephen Kuenzli is a DevOps and cloud security expert and has offered a free video call for folks seeking software process delivery guidance. He also has some great content on his site related to formalising process and communication flows which are of particular relevance for many businesses right now.
• Chris Ferdinandi is a front-end expert who has put together free guides for web developers on finding work.
• Jonathan Stark delivered a webinar on a problem I’m currently struggling with — how to work from home with your kids around.
• Philip Morgan has personally helped me greatly with my business and if you’re a developer or architect who’s interested in going independent some day and find yourself now with more time on your hands to take things further, I strongly recommend his free email course on going from coder to consultant.

Once again, if I can help you in any way, please just hit reply.

Keep safe!

— Paul