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As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

In the first article in this series, I demonstrated how to use planned failure to ensure expected outcomes in your code. In this second article, I'll continue developing my example project—an automated cat door that opens during daylight hours and locks during the night.

As a reminder, you can follow along using the .NET xUnit.net testing framework by following the instructions here.

The zope.interface library is a way to overcome ambiguity in Python interface design. Let's take a look at it.

The Zen of Python is loose enough and contradicts itself enough that you can prove anything from it. Let's meditate upon one of its most famous principles: "Explicit is better than implicit."

Security is a misunderstood element in DevOps. Some see it as outside of DevOps' purview, while others find it important (and overlooked) enough to recommend moving to DevSecOps. No matter your perspective on where it belongs, it's clear that security affects everyone.

The age of AI is upon us. Emerging technologies give humans some relief from routine tasks and allow us to get back to the creative, adaptable creatures many of us prefer being.

So a shift to developing human skills in the workplace should be a critical focus for organizations. In this part of my series on learning agility, we'll take a look at some reasons for a sense of urgency over reskilling our workforce and reconnecting to our humanness.

In a recent article, I introduced the chown command, which is used for modifying ownership of files on systems. Recall that ownership is the combination of the user and group assigned to an object. The chgrp and newgrp commands provide additional help for managing files that need to maintain group ownership.

Data science is an exciting new field in computing that's built around analyzing, visualizing, correlating, and interpreting the boundless amounts of information our computers are collecting about the world. Of course, calling it a "new" field is a little disingenuous because the discipline is a derivative of statistics, data analysis, and plain old obsessive scientific observation.

In my article Mutation testing is the evolution of TDD, I exposed the power of iteration to guarantee a solution when a measurable test is available. In that article, an iterative approach helped to determine how to implement code that calculates the square root of a given number.

Are friends and family constantly asking you to troubleshoot issues with their Windows or Mac device? Being the resident support technician in your home is an important job. Like any responsible technology steward, you are going to try your best to help out. However, it might be quite a challenge if it has been a while since you last used such an operating system.

How long has it been since you last used Windows? Before using Linux, were you primarily a Mac user? Or, are you using Windows or Mac now either at home or work?

Everyone has opinions and preferences, especially when it comes to food. To establish a criterion when answering "How spicy should a jalapeño be?." the Scoville Heat Scale was developed as a standard to measure spiciness. This scale allows people to communicate and share information about how spicy we like our peppers.

I am no expert on teaching programming, but when I want to get better at something, I try to find a way to have fun with it. For example, when I wanted to get better at shell scripting, I decided to practice by programming a version of the Minesweeper game in Bash.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in programming and is often quizzed during interviews. These strings are a sequence of characters that are immutable which means unchanging over time or unable to be changed.

Java has a number of methods for comparing strings; this article will teach you the primary operation of how to compare strings in Java.

There are six options:

Software teams seeking to provide better products and services must focus on faster release cycles. But running reliable systems at ever-increasing speeds presents a big challenge. Software teams can have both quality and speed by adjusting their policies around ongoing service ownership. While on-call plays a large part in this model, advancement in knowledge, more resilient code, increased collaboration, and better practices mean engineers don't have to wake up to a nightmare.

Software teams seeking to provide better products and services must focus on faster release cycles. But running reliable systems at ever-increasing speeds presents a big challenge. Software teams can have both quality and speed by adjusting their policies around ongoing service ownership. While on-call plays a large part in this model, advancement in knowledge, more resilient code, increased collaboration, and better practices mean engineers don't have to wake up to a nightmare.

Cybersecurity is no longer just the domain of the IT staff putting in firewalls and backing up servers. It takes a commitment from the top and a budget to match. The stakes are high when it comes to keeping your customers' information safe.

At a high level, any machine learning problem can be divided into three types of tasks: data tasks (data collection, data cleaning, and feature formation), training (building machine learning models using data features), and evaluation (assessing the model). Features, defined as "individual measurable propert[ies] or characteristic[s] of a phenomenon being observed," are very useful because they help a machine understand the data and classify it into categories or predict a value.

Last week, I introduced you to the origins of the mainframe's origins from a community perspective. Let's continue our journey, picking up at the end of 1999, which is when IBM got onboard with Linux on the mainframe (IBM Z).

According to the Linux on z Systems Wikipedia page:

In my previous article, I explained how to get started with Z-shell (Zsh). For some users, the most exciting thing about Zsh is its ability to adopt new themes. It's so easy to theme Zsh both because of the active community designing visuals for the shell and also because of the Oh My Zsh project, which makes it trivial to install them.

With few commercial participants, early free software and open source communities were, by definition, community-led. Software was designed and created organically by communities of users in response to their needs and inspiration. The results, to a degree nobody predicted, were often magical.

Can open source technology help keep our elections honest? With its Trust The Vote Project, the Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Institute is working on making that a reality for elections in the United States and around the world.