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Adding a user is one of the most fundamental exercises on any computer system; this article focuses on how to do it on a Linux system.

Before getting started, I want to mention three fundamentals to keep in mind. First, like with most operating systems, Linux users need an account to be able to log in. This article specifically covers local accounts, not network accounts such as LDAP. Second, accounts have both a name (called a username) and a number (called a user ID). Third, users are typically placed into a group. Groups also have a name and group ID.

Emoji are those fanciful pictograms that snuck into the Unicode character space. They're all the rage online, and people use them for all kinds of surprising things, from signifying reactions on social media to serving as visual labels for important file names. There are many ways to enter Unicode characters on Linux, but the GNOME desktop makes it easy to find and type an emoji.

In Measuring the health of open source communities, I covered some of the key questions and metrics that we’ve explored as part of the CHAOSS project as they relate to project founders, maintainers, and contributors. In this article, we focus on open source corporate constituents (such as open source program offices, business risk and legal teams, human resources, and others) and end users.

There are three schools of thought on how to go about decorating a room:

If you made through part 1, congrats! You have the patience it takes to format data. In that article, I cleaned up my National Football League data set using a few Python libraries and some basic football knowledge. Picking up where I left off, it's time to take a closer look at my data set.

I didn't expect DrupalCon Seattle's opening keynote to address the barriers that hold people back from making open source contributions. So imagine my surprise when Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project lead and co-founder and CTO of Acquia, which created Drupal, used his time onstage to share an apology.

I'm a fan of Konsole and GNOME Terminal, and I use them both regularly. They're great projects, and they represent modern terminals that meet the needs of users who spend their day in a shell, as well as users who only dip into a Unix shell every now and again. They integrate nicely into a desktop environment, bridging the gap between common GUI tasks and common shell tasks. I use GNOME Terminal at work and Konsole at home, and I enjoy them both.

No matter what medium of content you consume these days (podcasts, articles, tweets, etc.), you'll probably come across some reference to data. Whether it's to back up a talking point or put a meta-view on how data is everywhere, data and its analysis are in high demand.

As a programmer, I've found data science to be more comparable to wizardry than an exact science. I've coveted the ability to get ahold of raw data and glean something useful and concrete from it. What a useful talent!

“What’s your GitLab?” is one of the first questions I was asked on my first day working for the GNOME Foundation—the nonprofit that supports GNOME projects, including the desktop environment, GTK, and GStreamer. The person was referring to my username on GNOME’s GitLab instance.

The spooky season is almost here! This year, decorate your haunt with a unique Halloween lantern made with open source!

Typically, a portion of a lantern's structure is opaque to block the light from within. What makes a lantern a lantern are the parts that are missing: windows cut from the structure so that light can escape. While it's impractical for lighting, a lantern with windows in spooky shapes and lurking silhouettes can be atmospheric and a lot of fun to create.

In 1998, the movie Titanic was released, mobile phones were just a luxury, and pagers were still in use. This was also the year I got my first computer. I can remember the details as if it were yesterday: Pentium 133MHz and just 16MB of memory. Back in that time (while running nothing less than Windows 95), this was a good machine. I can still hear in my mind the old spinning hard drive noise when I powered that computer on, and see the Windows 95 flag.

Great news, everyone! Forrester Research says that 95% of all recorded breaches in 2016 came from only three industries: government, technology, and retail. Everyone else is safe... ish, right?

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we cover System76 shipping Coreboot-powered firmware, a new OS for the apocalypse, and more open source news!

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Grace Hopper is one of those iconic figures that really needs no introduction. During her long career in the United States Navy, she was a key figure in the early days of modern computing. If you have been involved in open source or technology in general, chances are you have already heard several anecdotes about Grace Hopper. The story of finding the first computer bug, perhaps? Or maybe you have heard some of her nicknames: Queen of Code, Amazing Grace, or Grandma COBOL?

I spend a lot of time on the road and enjoy listening to podcasts about a variety of topics.

There's always a lot to get excited about in October: sweater weather, pumpkin spice, Halloween costumes, and for the last three years, Hacktoberfest.

Prometheus is an increasingly popular—for good reason—open source tool that provides monitoring and alerting for applications and servers. Prometheus' great strength is in monitoring server-side metrics, which it stores as time-series data.

DevOps is well-understood in the IT world by now, but it's not flawless. Imagine you have implemented all of the DevOps engineering practices in modern application delivery for a project. You've reached the end of the development pipeline—but a penetration testing team (internal or external) has detected a security flaw and come up with a report. Now you have to re-initiate all of your processes and ask developers to fix the flaw.

Global climate change affects us all. It is, at its heart, an energy issue—a problem too large and too complex for any single person, company, university, research institute, science laboratory, nuclear trade association, or government to address alone. It will require a truly global, cooperative effort, one aimed at continued innovation across a range of technologies: renewables, batteries, carbon capture, nuclear power development, and more.

In the many, many technical interviews I've gone through in my professional career, I've noticed that I'm rarely asked questions that have definitive answers. Most of the time, I'm asked open-ended questions that do not have an absolutely correct answer but evaluate my prior experiences and how well I can explain things.

One interesting open-ended question that I've been asked several times is:

"As you start your first day on a project, what five tools do you install first and why?"