We are in week two of the corona pandemic. The last 8 days changed completely how we work and collaborate. We closed our office at Robotic Eyes and all employees had to work from home. As a software company, we are in a good position to switch from on-site collocated style to a complete remote development firm.

One of the major challenges - except the business impact and consequences - is to keep up the communication and to organize the team. We are already using Microsoft Teams as our communication and sharing platform, however, on Monday (first day of remote), Microsoft faced issues with availability. The system was just too exchausted and even simple messages could not be delivered.

This forced us to look for alternatives such as Jtsi or Riot/Matrix. Both alternatives had some issues, and did not support screen sharing out of the box. Luckily, Microsoft fixed the scaling issues, and Teams was working like a charm from Wednesday on.

First Remote Hackathon

Since the company was founded in 2016, we organized Hackathons on a regular basis to allow employees working on new cool ideas. However, March 17th should be a special Hackathon - the first remote Hackathon.

We decided - although not being co-located - to do the Hackathon. Starting at 1pm, we called in Teams and setup a list of ideas on a collective board. Every two hours we called in again and sync’ed up on progress. Except of having Pizza and beer together in the office, people posted their pictures in Teams.

It was great fun to see lots of different moments of every particiant! Let’s see if we will have another Hackathon, if the corona virus threat is still ubiquitous in a couple of weeks.

Quarantine is getting routine

Today we started the second week of quarantine. We are already used to our remote offices; everybody established a cosy environment. I also installed a banner behind me, in order to have a professional background for customer video calls.

Remote AR

Since our company is providing services and solutions based on Augmented Reality (AR), we also had to find a way to share AR experiences with our (potential) customers. Luckily the technology is already available:

  • Microsoft Teams
  • Zoom

Both have the built-in functionality for sharing the screen on a smartphone. Therefore, it is easy to just open up the app and let the participant join the AR experience.

COVID-19 Statistics

Apart from the change in our day-to-day work, I was looking for a quick possibility to get a good overview over the current corona virus situation. As always, I am looking into some suckless terminal-based scripts which gives me access to important number.

I found the following website https://corona-stats.online. Of course, you can open up the link in the browser, but it is more fun to get the result using

$ curl https://corona-stats.online

This spits out a nice text table sorted by number of tested corona cases on the world, here is a small excerpt.

╔══════╤════════════════╤════════════╤═══════════╤════════╤ .. ╤══════════╤═══════════╗
║ Rank │ Country        │ Confirmed  │ Recovered │ Deaths │ .. │ 1 Day ▲  │ 1 Week ▲  ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
║      │ World          │    335,955 │    97,704 │ 14,632 │ .. │ 31,431 ▲ │ 168,509 ▲ ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
║ 1    │ China (CN)     │     81,397 │    72,362 │  3,265 │ .. │     92 ▲ │     394 ▲ ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
║ 2    │ Italy (IT)     │     59,138 │     7,024 │  5,476 │ .. │  5,560 ▲ │  34,391 ▲ ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
║ 3    │ US (US)        │     33,272 │         0 │    417 │ .. │  7,783 ▲ │  29,773 ▲ ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
║ 4    │ Spain (ES)     │     28,768 │     2,575 │  1,772 │ .. │  3,394 ▲ │  20,970 ▲ ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
║ 5    │ Germany (DE)   │     24,873 │       266 │     94 │ .. │  2,660 ▲ │  19,078 ▲ ║
╟──────┼────────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────┼ .. ┼──────────┼───────────╢
...

This is great, but you can even get it better. I just want to track the cases in my country Austria. Therefore, I’ve written a small script using standard *NIX commands.

#!/bin/sh

[ "$(stat -c %y ~/.cache/corona 2>/dev/null | cut -d' ' -f1 )" != "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')" ] && curl -s https://corona-stats.online/Austria > ~/.cache/corona

grep "Austria" ~/.cache/corona |
sed "s/\s*//g ; s/║//g ; s/│/;/g" |
awk -F';' '{print "confirmed " $3 " (" $9") deaths " $5 " ("$7"%)"}'

You can download the code from the following gist. Just put the script in your path, and make sure to make it executable.

chmod +x corona.sh
./corona.sh

confirmed 3,244 (430▲) deaths 16 (0.49%)