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I use SSH constantly. Every day I find myself logged in to multiple servers and Pis (both in the same room as me and over the internet). I have many devices I need access to, and different requirements for gaining access, so in addition to using various SSH/SCP command options, I have to maintain a config file with all the connection details.

Over time I’ve come up with a few time-saving tips and tools that you might find useful, too.

Jinja2 is a templating language for Python. While it got its start on the web for use with the Flask framework, it is popular in many other places. Both Flask and Pelican use it to template HTML pages, allowing seperation between style and content.

Like most developers, I search and read source code all day long. Personally, I've never gotten used to integrated development environments (IDEs), and for years, I mainly used grep and copy/pasted file names to open Vi(m).

Eventually, I came up with this script, slowly refining it as needed.

Have you ever wanted to list all the files in a directory, but just the files, nothing else? How about just the directories? If you have, then the following script, which is open source under GPLv3, could be what you have been looking for.

Of course, you could use the find command:

If you're on an email discussion group long enough, at some point, you'll see an email from a list member asking to be unsubscribed. Typically, at least 10 other people on the list will respond with instructions on how to unsubscribe, and those 10 responses will be answered by 10 more people confirming or commenting on the instructions. That's a lot of traffic to a mailing list just so one person can unsubscribe.

The Grafana project started in 2013 when Torkel Ödegaard decided to fork Kibana and turn it into a time-series and graph-focused dashboarding tool. His guiding vision: to make everything look more clean and elegant, with fewer things distracting you from the data.

OpenTaxSolver is an open source application for US taxpayers to calculate their state and federal income tax returns. Before I get into the software, I want to share some of the information I learned when researching this article. I spent about five hours a day for a week looking into open source options for doing your taxes, and I learned about a lot more than just tax software.

In the first part of this series, we defined community as a fundamental principle in open organizations, where people often define their roles, responsibilities, and affiliations through shared interests and passions, not title, role, or position on an organizational chart.

From the very beginning, I wanted the "About me" page on my WordPress website romanluks.eu to be interactive.

At first, I experimented with Dart, a programming language developed by Google that transcompiles into JavaScript. I killed the project when I realized I was making a game instead of an "About me" page.

When I first heard about WebAssembly and the possibility of creating web user interfaces with Qt, just like I would in ordinary C++, I decided to take a deeper look at the technology.

While Vim is fast and efficient, by default, it is but a mere text editor. At least, that's what it would be without plugins, which build upon Vim and add extra features to make it so much more than just a window for typing text. With the right mix of plugins, you can take control of your life and forge your own unique Vim experience. You can customize your theme, and you can add syntax highlighting, code linting, version trackers, and much much more.

DevOps is a software engineering discipline focused on minimizing the lead time to achieve a desired business impact. While business stakeholders and sponsors have ideas on how to optimize business operations, those ideas need to be validated in the field. This means business automation (i.e., software products) must be placed in front of end users and paying customers. Only then will the business confirm whether the initial idea for improvement was fruitful or not.

The Command Line Heroes podcast is back, and this season it covers the machines that run all the programming languages I covered last season. As the podcast staff puts it:

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at new features for Raspbian, Wireguard and Linux kernel, free Python course from the NSA and more!

I frequently get questions from open source project creators or new founders of commercial open source software (COSS) companies about the best way to market their product. Implicit in that inquiry lies more foundational questions: "What the hell is product marketing? How much time should I spend on it?"

This article aims to share some knowledge and specific action items to help open source creators understand product marketing as a concept and how to bootstrap it on their own until a project reaches the next level of traction.

2019 was a year of learning in the Cherry household. I am a senior software engineer who set out to learn new skills and, along the way, I taught my husband, Chris. By teaching him some of the things I learned and asking him to work through my technology walkthrough articles, I helped Chris learn new skills that enabled him to pivot his career deeper into the technology field. And I learned new ways to make my walkthroughs and training materials more accessible for readers to digest.

In a previous article, I explained how I refurbish old dual-core computers ranging from roughly five to 15 years old. Properly restored, these machines can host a fully capable lightweight Linux distribution like Mint/Xfce, Xubuntu, or Lubuntu and perform everyday tasks. But what if you have a really old computer gathering dust in your attic or basement?

The FreeMesh system promises to bring fully open source mesh networking to the masses. I recently had a chance to test it; it installed quickly, and the performance was great—especially for the price.

If you ask most developers when they prefer to work, many will say their most productive hours are at night. This may be especially true for open source contributors who are contributing to projects outside of their day job (though hopefully within healthy limits to avoid burnout).

Some like to start in the evening and work till the early hours while others get up super early—say, 4 a.m.—to get most of the programming work done before the daily grind kicks in.

Great Teeming Workspaces (GTWS) is a complex workspace management package for Git that makes it easy to have development environments for different projects and different versions of a project.