Our statement on the COVID-19 pandemic

These are extraordinary times.

In our 23 years, Mobilize.Net has made a lot of friends around the world: customers, partners, and employees. And today our thoughts and hopes are with all of them and their families as they deal with this difficult situation.

At Mobilize.Net we've been working remotely for years. Commutes in San Jose, Costa Rica, where our engineering center is located are difficult at best and impossible at worst. To help alleviate congestion and reduce the strain on our employees, we've had a "work from home" policy in effect for several years. We've also had many customer projects that required us to work side-by-side with customer engineers, but do it remotely from San Jose. To that end, we've adopted cloud-based collaboration tools like Zoom Meetings, Microsoft Teams, Team Foundation Server, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio Live Share (pair programming/debugging), and more.

Effective immediately, we will only do remote customer work until such time as "social distancing" is no longer required for health reasons. This is and has been an ordinary process for us with customers all over the world so this should not in any way interfere with the progress of on-going customer projects.

And like many of you, we will monitor the WHO, CDC, and local health authorities for status and guidance on coping with the pandemic.

Remote is the new normal

How many white-collar jobs that used to be tied to an office are suddenly possible from home? Organizations all over the world are quickly adapting to let employees work from home to avoid spreading illness. Old client-server applications that run on the desktop need remote access; lift-and-shift may seem prudent now, but over time you may find that it's both more expensive and less helpful than modernization. Now is a good time to develop strategies about how to move those apps to true cloud native architectures.

What about legacy code?

I wish an emergency like this could somehow suspend the on-going problems old applications, languages, and platforms continue to create, but it won't. Legacy applications that need to be modernized won't wait for the crisis to end, and with a global recession possibly looming, resource management has rarely been more critical. Given that, please consider how automated migration can dramatically reduce the time, cost, and risk compared to rewriting from scratch. To help you make an informed decision, we've assembled some resources here for you to browse.

Bringing you virtual tech events this year to stay connected

We know you need to stay up to date, so we'll keep you informed of virtual events coming your way this year. For example, Microsoft recently announced that Build 2020 would be a online-only event, unlike previous years. This week our favorite live coder, Jeff Fritz, is hosting a full 10-hour tutorial on ASP.NET Core 3.1 on Twitch. On March 26, from 7am ET to 7pm, Progress Telerik will do 12 hours of live coding with two teams creating two apps. Also including a CodeParty with contests and give-aways to keep it lively. 

Few if any one alive today has gone through something like this. But together we can weather the storm. Our best wishes to each and every one of you. Stay healthy!

- The Mobilize.Net team