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Across the globe, businesses are transitioning to remote work. While remote work or "working from home" has been an overall growing trend, the recent push to transition has been driven by the COVID-19 response; organizations are asking staff to work from home to help limit the spread of the Coronavirus.

If you are like many of your peers, you may quite suddenly find yourself working from home. How can you remain productive at home when you're used to going into an office?

Content advisory: this article contains frank discussions of breast cancer.

What's the first question you ask your surgeon when you're discussing reconstruction options after breast cancer?

"How many USB ports can you give me?" is probably not the one that comes to mind for many people!

Although the remark was said jokingly, it sparked a thread that would ultimately become SenseBreast—an early prototype of a sensing mastectomy prosthetic, based on open hardware.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

The proc filesystem is an important feature of Linux that you can't ignore. proc is a pseudo or virtual filesystem that provides an interface to kernel data structures. In other words, proc isn't an actual filesystem in the real-world sense; rather, it resides only in memory and not on a disk. It is automatically mounted by the system.

The Bash shell is definitely not the only shell out there, but it's one of the most powerful. This makes it a popular choice for systems administrators needing to develop serious applications that go beyond a simple "laundry list" of commands to run on a system. There are lots of great uses for other shells (I default to Tcsh for Git hooks, for instance), but Bash is an easy choice for serious scripting, and here's why.

Are you ready to take the plunge into desktop Linux? Join the rapidly growing community of people who are living without the limits, lack of security, and lack of privacy afforded by proprietary operating systems. The question I had in the beginning was: How do I find a computer that runs Linux?

There's growing awareness in the design community about the importance of design ethics and the way proprietary technology subjugates users. As a user experience designer, I believe technology should be designed to respect the earth as well as creators and users. Using and contributing to Linux is one way to align my design ethics with my practice.

When reaching for a templating language for writing a Python web application, there are an abundance of robust solutions. 

Kanban is nothing new; in fact, it predates most readers of this article. Its age becomes apparent when we add the year Toyota introduced kanban in its main plant machine shop (1953) to the timeline image from our analyzing the DNA of DevOps article.

I recently came across Jenkins Configuration as Code (JCasC), an interesting project that uses YAML formats for writing Jenkins configurations.  YAMLs have been used in Kubernetes (and OpenShift), Ansible, and many other things. In this article, I will explain how to get started with JCasC. You will need a working Podman installation on your system, so follow Podman's Getting Started guide if you need to set it up first.

My job title is senior software engineer, but that's not what my closest co-workers call me. They call me "Cherrybomb" because of all the things I blow up. My regularly scheduled failures have been tracked down to our quarterly earnings and outage times. Literally, I am the production disaster you read about that says, "what not to do ever, in any case, at any time."

Vim is one of the most popular text editors out there, so it is definitely worth taking time to learn how to use it. If the only things you learn how to do with the ubiquitous Vi(m) command-line text editor are to open a file, enter and edit some text, save the edited files, and exit the program, you will be much better off for it.

Circumstances where you will find it extremely convenient to know Vim nearly always involve tasks running remote shell operations. If you regularly use secure shell: 

Pastebin.com and similar websites make it quick and easy to share snippets of code, data, or text. Pastebin sites are often used when filing bug reports because projects often request that lengthy files or log outputs are put into a separate site. Sharing (non-sensitive) data over a pastebin site is helpful for doing this type of troubleshooting or collaboration while keeping bug reports easy to read.

In 1994, my family bought a Macintosh Performa 475 as a home computer. I had used Macintosh SE computers in school and learned to type with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, so I've been a Mac user for well over 25 years. Back in the mid-1990s, I was attracted to its ease of use. It didn't start with a DOS command prompt; it opened to a friendly desktop. It was playful.

While cloud storage offers many advantages, there's nothing quite like having your data on a physical hard drive. When you save data to a drive, you know exactly where your data is, and it's always available when you need it. When you save data to an external portable drive like a USB thumb drive, it's even better—not only do you know where your data is, but you can take your data with you everywhere you go.

Anyone can use plain text to work more effectively. The one tool that you need in order to do that is a decent text editor.

Unless you're a coder, a system administrator, or a DevOps person, that editor doesn't need to be brimming with functions and features. A lightweight text editor is more than enough for most people.

When it comes to picking one, choices abound. You can use the editor that's baked into your Linux distribution, or you can consider one of these lightweight text editors:

In 2019, DigitalOcean and the open source community celebrated the sixth annual Hacktoberfest, an inclusive community event that inspires open source participation and maintenance. It was an exciting year with record-breaking numbers of pull requests, participants, and events around the world.

Many of those that are familiar with the maker movement, including me, believe there is a significant opportunity to apply open source design principles and mass-scale collaborative distributed manufacturing technologies (like open source 3D printing) to at least partially overcome medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Already, an Italian hospital saved COVID-19 patients' lives by 3D printing valves for reanimation devices.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look open source solutions for COVID-19, Google's new security tool, code cleanup software from Uber, and more!

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The internet offers plenty of free messaging services. Applications like WhatsApp and Viber are part of our daily life and are the most common way we communicate with relatives and friends. But security awareness is increasing the demand for a truly private chat solution. Furthermore, messaging apps take up a lot of space in our devices, so an alternative chat channel could be useful to share media, info, and contacts with our friends.