We all live in difficult times. Coronavirus pandemic is raging. There is the danger of a global crisis. Many of us are confined to our homes.

I believe that this is the moment when we should re-evaluate our priorities on many different levels, professional being one of them. We should all take this opportunity of being at our homes to raise our profile and become more proficient at our jobs. We cannot know for sure what the future brings. But, whatever it is, it’s always best to be prepared. Professionally, the best way to be ready for turbulent times is to learn.

Learn a new skillset. Improve an existing skill. Use this time to become a Kubernetes ninja. Master monitoring and alerting. Learn a new programming language. Figure out how to adopt GitOps and continuous delivery. Find out a better way to deploy your applications.

The sky is the limit, and the amount useful skills that we can obtain is close to infinite.

I want to help. While I cannot create a vaccine for Coronavirus, and I cannot prevent the upcoming crisis, I might be able to help you ramp up your skills.

I just changed the minimum price of all my books on LeanPub.com to $0. If you feel like you want to pay for them or if you can expense books to your manager, go ahead and increase the price to whatever you think is right. Nevertheless, you can get them all for $0. It’s up to you to decide what is the value that is affordable and fair.

After a few days, and hundreds of downloaded books for free, the prices are back to "normal". I couldn’t keep them for free for too long to avoid annoying the distributor.

Please go to The DevOps Toolkit Series, and you’ll find the LeanPub links for all the books.

Similarly, you might want to subscribe to the Udemy course Canary Deployments To Kubernetes Using Istio And Friends. Now, unlike LeanPub that allows a lot of flexibility, Udemy is a bit more restrictive with what authors can do. So, I created a free coupon for the first ten redemptions. If you were not quick enough to be among the first ten, please use the coupon with the current best price (expires on March 22). Unfortunately, I don’t have a say in what the "best price" is. Udemy decides that.

Finally, you might find DevOps Paradox podcast useful. Sometimes it provides valuable insights, while others can be considered entertaining. Darin and I enjoy recording it, and that is probably the most important reason we’re doing it.

I hope that you and your family are holding up, that there will be no recession, and that there will be no layoffs. Nevertheless, I believe that we should all be prepared for the worst and that those books and courses might help you ramp up your skills.

Feel free to contact me through the DevOps20 Slack Workspace (my user is vfarcic), Twitter, LinkedIn, carrier pigeons, or any other means. I’d be happy to talk and help out resolving any issues and doubts.