opensource.com

Over the past few years, it's become difficult to find a website that is just "http://…" This is because the industry has finally realised that security on the web is "a thing," and also because it has become easy for both servers and clients to set up and use HTTPS connections. A similar shift may be on its way in computing across cloud, edge, Internet of Things, blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and beyond.

For many years, monolithic applications were the standard enterprise architecture for achieving business requirements. But that changed significantly once cloud infrastructure began treating business acceleration at scale and speed.

In my work as a programming language researcher, I need to create artifacts that are easy to understand and well-documented. To make my work easier, I found a simple way to automate generating source code documentation, creating HTML and PDF versions of user documentation, compiling a technical (research) document to PDF, generating the bibliography, and provisioning of virtual machines with the software artefact installed for ease of reproducibility of my research.

CPU steal time is defined in the GNU top command as "time stolen from [a] VM by the hypervisor." CPU steal time occurs when a hypervisor process and a guest instance are trying to utilize the same hypervisor physical core (pCPU) at the same time. This results in less processor time available to the guest's virtual CPU (vCPU) and performance degradation for the guest.

Welcome to 2020 at Opensource.com!

Last month, on December 31, 2019, while our editorial team had settled down for a long winter's nap—no, truthfully we were simply taking a well-deserved break—Opensource.com hit a record with 2.1 million reads and 1.3 million unique visitors.

That kind of growth shows that people—a lot of them—are looking for help in figuring out how to choose and use open source. And our intention is for our community to be the place that continues to help them contribute. Here's what that will look like in 2020.

A system admin often writes Bash scripts, some short and some quite lengthy, to accomplish various tasks.

Have you ever looked at an installation script provided by a software vendor? They often add a lot of functions and logic in order to ensure that the installation works properly and doesn’t result in damage to the customer’s system. Over the years, I’ve amassed a collection of various techniques for enhancing my Bash scripts, and I’d like to share some of them in hopes they can help others. Here is a collection of small scripts created to illustrate these simple examples.

Piwheels automates building Python wheels (pre-compiled Python packages) for all of the projects on PyPI, the Python Package Index, using Raspberry Pi hardware to ensure compatibility. This means that when a Raspberry Pi user wants to install a Python library using pip, they get a ready-made compiled version that's guaranteed to work on the Raspberry Pi. This makes it much easier for Raspberry Pi users to dive in and get started with their projects.

The goto shell utility allows users to navigate to aliased directories and also supports autocompletion.

Before you can use goto, you need to register your directory aliases. For example:

then change to that directory, e.g.:

Crikey, you lot have been busy writing in December. We've got more data munging from Greg Sutcliffe; we've got writing modules for orchestrating security; we've got networks, containers and thoughts from a sysadmin. No YouTubes this month—we thought you'd have enough reading here with the articles. Enjoy!

If you spot an interesting Ansible story on your travels, please send us the link via Mark on Twitter, and the Ansible Community team will curate the best submissions.

Python is a high-level, object-oriented programming language known for its simple syntax. It is consistently among the top-rated programming languages for building RESTful APIs.

Like almost everyone on the planet, I have a few social media accounts. I mostly stick to Facebook to stay up to date with friends and family and Twitter to follow a few other people.

Have you ever wanted to make a post that includes italics or some other fancy formatting? You can easily change the text to italics or bold when you're writing an email, but most social media platforms don't provide many formatting options.

Building a remote development team presents unique challenges. Trying to build a cross-functional team, full of various personalities, virtually can lead to communication disasters. Fortunately, through planning, smart hiring, training, and communication, project leaders can build and lead virtual development teams successfully.

At GitHub, Brian Douglas' official title is developer advocate, but the one he prefers to use is "Beyoncé advocate." This is partly because he views the 40 million GitHub users and the Beyhive, Beyoncé's enormous and passionate fan base, similarly. He says his role at GitHub is to "go to bat for the hive"—helping people answer questions and find resources to help them develop on GitHub better.

Not a day goes by that I don't see a tweet or hear somebody talking about burnout. Burnout is becoming a pervasive part of our lives, especially in tech and open source communities. In What you need to know about burnout in open source communities, I defined burnout and explored its causes, symptoms, and potential treatments. But a better question is about prevention: How do we change the underlying processes, cultures, and tools to prevent burnout from occurring in the first place?

In the decade since they were made a cornerstone of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, electronic health records (EHRs) have become omnipresent in the US health system. EHRs enable healthcare providers to keep track of their patients' medical data and share it with other authorized parties.

Rust has drawn plenty of attention from programmers on sites like Hacker News for a while. While many have long loved using the language for hobby projects, it didn't start catching on in industry until 2019, when this really started to change.

Historically and theoretically speaking, a decade, a century, or a millennium starts when the clock turns midnight on January 1 of the year one of its decimal order. For example, the 20th century started on January 1, 1901, not on January 1, 1900. The reason for this is simple: there is no year 0 in our modern calendar, so these periods of time start on year 1 (using the Gregorian calendar). But that's not how we refer to time periods colloquially and culturally; for example, when we mention '80s music or movies, we're talking about the period from 1980 to 1989.

Getting one software process to talk to another software process is a delicate balancing act. It can be a vital function for an application, though, so it's a problem any programmer embarking on a complex project has to solve.

This is part 10 in an ongoing series about creating video games in Python 3 using the Pygame module. Previous articles are:

When Java SE 8 (aka core Java 8) was introduced in 2014, it introduced changes that fundamentally impact programming in it. The changes have two closely linked parts: the stream API and the functional programming constructs. This article uses code examples, from the basics through advanced features, to introduce each part and illustrate the interplay between them.