opensource.com

Work is hard right now. COVID-19 makes it a challenge to stay focused and motivated. But it was cathartic for me to do some research into how the open source community is responding to the global pandemic.

Since the end of January, the community has contributed to thousands of open source repositories that mention coronavirus or COVID-19. These repositories consist of datasets, models, visualizations, web and mobile applications, and more, and the majority are written in JavaScript and Python.

When you start working from home, one of the first things you might have noticed is that there almost no outside influences on your schedule.

You probably have meetings—some over team chat and others over video— that you have to attend, but otherwise, there's nothing requiring you to do anything at any specific time. What you find out pretty quickly, though, is that there's an invisible influence that sneaks up on you: deadlines.

Most collaborative tools these days recognize that not all users have accounts with their company or suite. In other words, if someone sends you a link to share.example.com but you don't have an account with example.com, then you'll likely be offered a chance to sign up.

Recently, deprecated APIs have been wreaking havoc on everyone's Kubernetes manifests. Why is this happening?!? It's because the objects that we've come to know and love are moving on to their new homes. And it's not like this happened overnight. Deprecation warnings have been in place for quite a few releases now. We've all just been lazy and thought the day would never come. Well, it's here!

In light of changing economical times in many countries around the world right now, you may find yourself wanting to revamp or improve your financial situation and your understanding of it. Or, perhaps one of your New Year's resolutions was to start budgeting? You are not alone.

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.

In Kubernetes, objects are analogous to a job or a completed task in the real world. You can use them to define common tasks, store them in a version control system, and apply them with kubectl apply. Kubernetes ensures that this triggers everything necessary to bring your declarative description to life by creating the depending resources (like pods) to run your software. Kubernetes contains a number of built-in object types that can be created with this workflow, like Deployments and Services.

A Markov model (named after the mathematician Andrey Markov) is used for forecasting in systems of random change. Markov's insight is that good predictions in this context can be made from only the most recent occurrence of an event, ignoring any occurrences before the current one. The approach might be described as memoryless or history-agnostic prediction.

Measuring the health of an open source community is a topic of increasing importance. From the moment an open source community forms, researchers, maintainers, and organizations try to understand whether the community is healthy and what makes it healthy.

"If you don't measure it, you cannot improve it"
—Peter Drucker

Many people are becoming involved with open source software development by contributing to projects on GitHub. Many of them use GitHub's graphical user interface (GUI), especially those who are new to the command-line interface (CLI). But what if you prefer working on the command line?

Memcached is a general-purpose memory-caching system. This means it is designed to save (or cache) answers to questions that take a long time to compute or retrieve and are likely to be asked again. A common use case is to accelerate the use of a database: for example, if we expect to need the list of "names of all people who are on team X" repeatedly, we might put this data in Memcached rather than run a SQL query each time. (Note: Memcached is occasionally referred to as "memcache." We will stick to the full name throughout this article.)

Calendar technology is not encrypted by default. That means any individual or provider between you and your calendar notifications can read and potentially store that information. Data deserves to be owned and secured by users through the use of open source paired with end-to-end encryption.

I believe that WordPress has a place in every PK-12 school. Most teachers are looking for ways to quickly engage parents with news from the classroom, and while many use social media, WordPress provides a powerful alternative. A simple classroom blog that's easily accessible to all is a great way to improve communication.

Meld is one of my essential tools for working with code and data files. It's a graphical diff tool, so if you've ever used the diff command and struggled to make sense of the output, Meld is here to help.

Here is a brilliant description from the project's website:

I've written before about what a community manager does, and if you ask ten community managers, you'll get 12 different answers. Mostly, though, you do what the community needs for you to do at any given moment. And a lot of it can be repetitive.

Back when I was a sysadmin, I had a rule: if I had to do something three times, I'd try to automate it. And, of course, these days, with awesome tools like Ansible, there's a whole science to that.

The Raspberry Pi makes for a useful and inexpensive home server for lots of things. I most often use the Raspberry Pi as a print server to share a laser printer with other devices in our home or as a personal file server to store copies of projects and other data.

Recently, we published an article about why developers prefer to code at night. Author Matt Shealy highlighted the many benefits of nocturnal programming including the quiet time and space for creative thinking.

Community building is table stakes in the success of any open source project. Even outside of open source, community is considered a competitive advantage for businesses in many industries—from retail, to gaming, to fitness. (For a deeper dive, see "When community becomes your competitive advantage" in the Harvard Business Review.)

Social networks have revolutionized people's lives in the last several years. People use social channels every day to stay connected with friends and family. But a common question remains regarding privacy and data security. Even if social networks have created complex privacy policies to protect users, maintaining your data in your own server is always the best option if you don't want to make them available to the public.

Everyone knows they shouldn't take shortcuts, especially in their work, and yet everyone does. Sometimes it doesn't matter, but when it comes to code development, though, it definitely does.

As any experienced programmer knows, building your code the quick and dirty way soon leads to problems down the line. These issues might not be disastrous, but they incur a small penalty every time you want to develop your code further.