How Can Developers Help Fight Coronavirus?

Coronavirus is now transforming our lives one a day-to-day basis. As I write these lines, it is killing hundreds, infecting thousands, and scaring billions. Countries are locking down, the stock market is in free fall and all events are getting cancelled.

On my end, I’m currently fighting the spread of the virus by:

washing my hands often,

working from home,

limiting my interactions with other people.

But apart from that, I’m sitting on my (carefully washed) hands and doing nothing to help.

The French President told us that the lives of the elderly are threatened. This means that our families are in danger, and in the meantime I’m just using soap and staying away from people.

On the other hand, we developers have valuable skills:

we can read code,

we can write code,

we’re used to learning stuff.

And with code, we can do anything.

For that reason, I am convinced that we can help fight coronavirus with software. I don’t know how yet, as I’m not in the medical software industry, and this is the point of sharing this post with you.

What software projects fight coronavirus?

What are the software projects that developers can contribute to, in order to fight coronavirus? Maybe…

Epidemiology software, to analyse the spread?

Genetics software, to better understand how the virus works?

ICU software, to help doctors resuscitate people that are in bad condition?

ER software, to handle the massive influx of people needing care?

Any other software?

The above are just my layman’s assumptions, they’re probably incorrect and incomplete.

What I’m sure of though, is that some software projects matter out there, and that we’re thousands of developers that are able to advance those projects.

We’re representing a considerable workforce with our spare time, and also because I’m sure some companies will be happy to lend some working time of their developers in order to help them save lives, get us out of this weird period, and restore business as usual.

Healthcare professionals are actively fighting coronavirus, dedicating their lives to it. Most of them are helping individuals. We developers can help with our skills too, as software scales and impacts lots of people.

Help by sharing

As as see it, you have 3 options now:

Option 1: you know of a software project that helps fight coronavirus. Be it open source or proprietary, share it with us in the comments section below. And share this post (Twitter, Reddit, HN, LinkedIn, FB, email your colleagues…) so that more people can contribute.

Option 2: you don’t know any software that helps fight coronavirus but you also believe that developers can help. Share this post (Twitter, Reddit, HN, LinkedIn, FB, email your colleagues…) so that it reaches people working on those projects.

Option 3: you don’t think developers can make a significant change in the coronavirus situation. Then wash your hands and stay away from people!

In solidarity with all the cancelled C++ events, and since we’re all focused on adjusting to protect ourselves and our families, there won’t be posts on Fluent C++ for a few days (Patrons continue to receive their ebooks and articles though). And also because I want you to come back to this post and check how the comments section grows. Better yet, subscribe to the comments in the discussion, by clicking the Subscribe button at the bottom left of the comments thread.

On Twitter, use the #CodeAgainstCOVID19 hashtag.

This is the first time most of us see such a thing in our life. The world is shutting down. Let’s do what we do best to help save it: code.

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