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We do a lot to level-up our careers. We learn new programming languages; we take on new projects at work; we work on side projects on the weekend; we contribute to open source communities. What if I were to tell you that, while these activities are helpful, there is one set of skills you should focus on if you truly want to advance your career.

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

If you haven’t heard of WebAssembly yet, then you will soon. It’s one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, but it’s everywhere. It’s supported by all the major browsers, and it’s coming to the server-side, too. It’s fast. It’s being used for gaming. It’s an open World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the web, standard. It’s platform-neutral and can run on Linux, Macs, and Windows.

I wrote a bunch of Bash scripts that make my life easier when I'm working with Git repositories. Many of my colleagues say there's no need; that everything I need to do can be done with Git commands. While that may be true, I find the scripts infinitely more convenient than trying to figure out the appropriate Git command to do what I want.

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

Yesterday, I talked about how I use OfflineIMAP to sync my mail to my local machine. Today, I'll talk about how I preprocess all that mail before I read it.

Creative Commons (CC) copyright is a series of copyright licenses that make it easy for creators to share their work and adapt the work of others. Just because something is online doesn’t mean you are free to use it however you like.

If you don’t see a Creative Commons license on the work or the creator doesn’t tell you their work is free to use, you cannot use it.

There are three ways to know if a work has a Creative Commons license: 

Java is still the pervasive development language among enterprise developers, even though it is not developers' preferred cloud-native runtime and is falling behind other languages, according to GitHub's Octoverse.

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

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

For more than a year, setV has been hidden away within my bash_scripts project, but it's time for it to become public. setV is a Bash function I use as an alternative to virtualenvwrapper. It provides basic features that enable you to do things such as:

The rpf script allows you to create, save, and run different rsync configurations via named profiles.

For example, create a new profile named backup by typing rpf -c backup. Assume that the username is user.

rpf creates the following directories:

Less than a year ago, I was in San Quentin State Prison serving a life sentence.

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

Contributing to open source as a hobby is a great way to dip your toes in the water on a new technology—and maybe even advance your career in the process. IBM software engineer Tara Gu found both of those things to be true when she started contributing to the Kubernetes container engine project in 2018.

As a sysadmin, every day I am faced with problems I need to solve quickly because there are users and managers who expect things to run smoothly. In a large environment like the one I manage, it's nearly impossible to know all of the systems and products from end to end, so I have to use creative techniques to find the source of the problems and (hopefully) come up with solutions.

Back in early 2014, I purchased my first ARM-based computer, a SolidRun CuBox-i4. My goal for the CuBox was to have a headless device (e.g., no display) that takes up minimal space in the audio equipment shelf, makes minimal noise, and serves music files to my digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and thus to the rest of the stereo. On paper, the CuBox was a perfect fit.

What does it mean to be the "right" person in a DevOps environment? That's the question that Josh Atwell, senior tech advocate at Splunk, tried to answer in his Lightning Talk at All Things Open 2019.

"Being the right person for DevOps is being more than just your ops/dev role," says Josh. "In order to be the right person for DevOps, you have to be improving yourself, and you have to be working to improve for others."

When you work with computers all day, it's fantastic to find repeatable commands and tag them for easy use later on. They all sit there, tucked away in ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc for Zsh users), waiting to help improve your day!

In this article, I share some of my favorite of these helper commands for things I forget a lot, in hopes that they will save you, too, some heartache over time.

When you're standing on a stage or doing a live demo in an online session, getting your project into a perfect-looking state may appear easy. But a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to create working, easy to use, and repeatable demo projects.

When you're doing a demo, the technology in a project must support your bigger story about the project without failing. My fellow JBoss technology evangelists and I often have to set up different technologies, so it became necessary for us to tune some sort of generic framework or template to put these demo projects into.