Ever watch news coverage of an incoming hurricane? You’ve got those correspondents out there in the elements, wearing their yellow rain ponchos, fighting the wind, and describing the scene to an audience watching at home. That situation reminds me of life as an engineer managing a large-scale IT infrastructure. Although I’m no longer a sysadmin there were certainly days where I had to put on my metaphorical poncho and weather an incoming storm.

On Friday afternoon, 17 July 2020, many internet users experienced connectivity issues around the same time. Even sites like Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify and League of Legends were inaccessible. Initially, it was suspected that there was some kind of Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack, but we’ve since learnt that the outage was caused by issues with CloudFlare’s DNS service.

I’ll go out on a limb and venture a guess that everybody reading this blog has had challenges adjusting to life in a post COVID world. I certainly have. My latest challenge? Navigating the simultaneous use of a face mask in public venues while wearing glasses to read stuff that’s more than 20 feet away. Just like ski and water goggles, my prescription specs also fog up when simply taking a leisurely stroll through the grocery store.