Everything Open 2025 – Day 3 – Morning

You’ve been laid off. Now what? by Mike Jang

  • Author is older
    • Doesn’t advertise age
    • Limits Linkedin to more recent jobs
    • Sees reaction when potential employers see his age
  • Empathy for the Hiring Company
    • What do they want, what are they looking for?
  • 11 Steps after a layoff
    • Negotiate your layoff – eg in US extended medical insurance. From a different budget. The laptop
    • Applying for Unemployment
    • Regain Focus – Accept the job is going and focus on next step
      • Get over your anger. It shows up in Interviews
    • Setup a git repo with resume, stuff you are proud, samples, other professional stuff
      • Clone and customize repo per job potentially
      • Maybe a professional website
      • The git profile is not enough
      • Show you domain expertise – k8s, cicd – say what you have actually done
    • Don’t just ask for help
      • “Reaching out to my network”
      • Be credible – don’t say you “love the company that laid you off”
      • Add a headline with what your expertise do
      • Describe expertise and create posts about them
      • A good linkedin recommendations especially from company that laid you off is good
      • Craft recommendation for others to sign. Offer to write in return
      • Followup posts
      • Elevator pitch. Remind you contacts (cause contacts might only vaguely remember you)
      • Empathy for your contacts, they want to know what to say
      • Laid off groups: common ground
      • Chat groups. Slack, discord. Maybe don’t include those still with your ex-employer. Alumni groups ( job posts, referrals )
      • Social Media – Shares Solutions, Endorse others. Don’t abuse companies or people/groups.
    • Finding a Hiring Manger
      • Target a company. Check see any contacts on Linkedin that work there or 2nd level contacts that do.
    • Customize the Application
      • Match the job description
      • Customize your resume
      • Include a cover letter
      • 4-8 hours / company
      • If the company does open source then contribute to their OS
      • Don’t – No Generic Resumes
      • Link to portfilio and domain knowledge
    • Share your schedule
      • Set up a calendar (you can share a calendar, but block off some time for other other stuff and to show you are busy)
    • Show what you can do – When you should do extra
    • Prepare for the interview
      • Review all your stuff from above
      • Your stories, your portfilio
      • A closing statement, like an elevator pitch with stuff from the interview. Makes it easy for interviewer to prepare their report
      • Followup and thank
      • Help the Interviewer remember you. Followup and remind something postive from interview. But don’t nag after that
    • Negotiate an offer
  • Non-Traditional Searches
    • Specialty Groups – OWASP, Y-Combinator
  • Remember the Empathy
    • They want to solve problems. Show them you can solve those problems.
    • Like your elevator pitch.

Modularisation of Open-Hardware to Tackle the Digital Winter by Paul Gardner-Stephen

  • Mega65 Project
  • nlnet Foundation – Funded from the EU and in turn fund Open Source projects
  • Digital Winter
    • What happens when our ability to build open hardware systems is broken?
    • Supply Chain Disruption
    • Regulatory Capture
      • Especially in Radio frequency space
    • Conflict or social unrest
    • Technology Passes Complexity Event Horizon
      • Already at there for chips
        • Protocol complexity for something like a web-browser
  • If we want to make systems that can survive a digital winter
    • Needs to be simple enough to implement the software
    • Hardware needs to be at least simple enough to salvage parts for bad units
  • Software
    • Simply enough to maintain and have a smaller attack surface
    • But enough complexity to be useful
    • Cut out dependencies
    • Cut out complexity and uneeded feature
    • Graceful degradation if offline or with lower resources
    • If device is small enough ( eg 64 MB of RAM) there is less room for the malware to hide
    • Browser in 32KB ( could be smaller if was in assembler )
  • Previous Board was big
    • Took long time to iterate a new design. Lots to redo each cycle
  • Module System Design Criteria
    • Large PAD size
    • Unambiguous orientation and placement
    • No sharp protrusions so easy to stack boards togeather
    • Relatively small
  • Decisions
    • Half-round castellated Pins
    • Easy to attache and unattached boards from each other as you soldier.
    • Can add glitter to attached modules so tamper obvious
  • Next
    • Design and fabricate various modules
    • Assemble and test
    • Design and fabricate simple case
  • What you can do for your projects
    • Offline functionality
    • Segregate your subsystems
    • Energy and Comms sovereignty
    • Simple 80% alternatives / fall-back modes
    • Fell free to help with our project.
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