opensource.com

In honor of Black History Month, I've garnered the opinions of a few of my favorite technology professionals and open source contributors. These four individuals are paving the way for the next generation alongside the work they're doing in the technology industry. Learn what Black History Month means to them, what influences their career, resources for minorities wanting to break into tech, and more.

Tameika Reed, founder of Women In Linux

A great deal has happened since DevOps became a common term in the IT world. With so much of the ecosystem being open source, it's important to review why it started and what it means to IT careers.

While there is no single definition, I consider DevOps to be a process framework that ensures collaboration between development and operations teams to deploy code to production environments faster in a repeatable and automated way. We will spend the rest of this article unpacking that statement.

Since its advent, DevOps has been pitted against IT service management (ITSM) and its ITIL framework.

Where do you go when you have a question? Since humans began walking the earth, we've asked the people around us—our family, friends, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, or other people we know well. Much later came libraries and bookstores offering knowledge and resources, as well as access for anyone to come in and search for the answers. When the home computer became common, these knowledge bases extended to electronic encyclopedias shipped on floppy disks or CD-ROMs.

The logzero library makes logging as easy as a print statement, which is quite a feat of simplicity. I'm not sure whether logzero took its name to fit in with the series of "zero boilerplate" libraries like pygame-zero, GPIO Zero, and guizero, but it's certainly in that category. It's a Python library that makes logging straightforward.

You can just use its basic logging to stdout the same way you might use print for information and debugging purposes, and it has a smooth learning curve towards more advanced logging, like logging to a file.

Product management is an interesting career. It's immensely rewarding to be the interface between users, business strategy, engineering, and product design. And it's also a highly lucrative career with increasing demand for ambitious and empathetic practitioners.

Whenever you're learning a new programming language, it's easy to criticize all the boilerplate text you need to memorize. Before you can get comfortable starting a project, you have to remember the preambles that, in theory, ought to be easy to remember since they're usually relatively short and repetitive. In practice, though, boilerplate text is too obscure in meaning to become an easy habit, but it's essential for a program to run.

Sometimes the text is just one line. For example, a shell script opens with a simple "shebang":

A while ago, I used Quicken to manage my finances. It's proprietary software, and year after year, it cost me more and more money for upgrades. Eventually, I realized it isn't prudent to take away from my budget to help me control my budget.

I usually read eBooks on my phone or with my Kobo eReader. I've never been comfortable reading books on larger screens. However, many people regularly read books on their laptops or desktops. If you are one of them (or think you might be), I'd like to introduce you to three eBook readers for the Linux desktop.

If you're a software engineer or a manager in the technology sector, creating or updating your resume can be a daunting task. What is most important to consider? How should you handle the formatting, the content, and your objective or summary? What work experience is relevant? How can you make sure automated recruitment tools don't filter out your resume?

As a hiring manager over the last seven years, I have seen a wide range of resumes and CVs; while some have been impressive, many more have been terribly written.

Editor's note: This article is part of a series on working with mental health conditions. It details the author's personal experiences and is not meant to convey professional medical advice or guidance.

I was speaking with one of my direct reports recently about a discussion we'd had with the broader team earlier in the week. In that discussion I had expressed some frustration that we weren't as far along on a particular project as I thought we needed to be.

While languages like Python and R are increasingly popular for data science, C and C++ can be a strong choice for efficient and effective data science.

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a language meant for use in the context of a particular domain. A domain could be a business context (e.g., banking, insurance, etc.) or an application context (e.g., a web application, database, etc.) In contrast, a general-purpose language (GPL) can be used for a wide range of business problems and applications.

GNU Emacs isn't the oldest interactive text editor for Unix—it's predated (at least) by the Vi editor—nor is it the only Emacs in existence. However, it's surely the most popular Emacs and one of the best editors available on POSIX.

Practices and expectations that one may have developed in working with conventional software licensing may lead to frustration when confronting open source software. The modest request, "Please, just show me the license" may be met with an unsatisfying response. While sometimes the response is very simple, often, the license information for open source software is more complicated and does not match the expectations set by conventional software licensing.

Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) is a free and open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator. It's ideally suited to those who are privacy-focused and still rely on RSS for their daily news. Tiny Tiny RSS is self-hosted software, so you have 100% control of the server, your data, and your overall privacy. It also supports a wide range of plugins, add-ons, and themes, Want a dark mode interface? No problem. Want to filter your incoming news based on keywords? TT-RSS has you covered there, as well.

Last year, I wrote about creating a video streaming server with Linux. That project uses the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RMTP), Nginx web server, Open Broadcast Studio (OBS), and VLC media player.

Here's the scenario: Whenever I need some source code or a bundle of art assets or a game from the internet, I download it to my ~/Downloads directory, navigate to the folder, and promptly realize I forgot the file name. It's not that I don't remember what I downloaded; it's the proliferation of file types that throws me off. Was it a tarball or a ZIP file? What was the version number? Have I downloaded a copy before?

In this article, I will explain how to not write loops anymore.

What? Whaddaya mean, no more loops?

Data science is a domain of knowledge that spans programming languages. Some are well-known for solving problems in this space, while others are lesser-known. This article will help you become familiar with doing data science with some popular languages.