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Scratch is a popular visual programming language for creating video games and animations. It also features a vector drawing tool that anyone can use to create unique game assets and art.

Scratch 1.0 was written in Smalltalk, an extremely hackable programming language that allowed users to peek behind the scenes of the software. It was popular across platforms and was even forked by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for extended support.

The DevOps movement has changed how we integrate and publish our work. It has taken us from slow, sometimes yearly, release cycles to daily (or even hourly, in some cases) releases. We are capable of writing code and seeing our changes in production almost instantly. While that can give our customers and us a warm and fuzzy feeling, it can also provide an opening for malicious attackers.

After serving as a CIO in higher education and government for nearly nine years and in senior IT leadership positions for most of my 20-year career, I decided to change gears. I had always found the most joy in coaching, advising, and mentoring IT leaders. At various CIO roundtable events and CIO forums, I often helped new CIOs and IT directors "get their feet under them," and I decided I wanted to do more of that.

Students everywhere are returning to school this season. But to what kinds of schools are they returning?

Are their classrooms organized like industrial-era factory floors, built around ideals like mass standardization and tailored for maximum efficiency? Or do they look more like agile, networked learning communities?

Are they listening passively from the back of the room? Or are they collaboratively shaping what and how they learn as their teachers connect their lessons to projects and contexts outside the classroom?

The tac command is essentially the cat command, but its purpose is to concatenate files in reverse. Like cat, it has a convenient fallback mode to print to standard output (STDOUT) if no output file is provided, making it one of those commands that are more often used as a lazy pager—like less and more—than the function it is named for.

Ah, the humble to-do list. When used badly, it becomes a source of stress and a trigger for procrastination. When used well, the to-do list can help you focus on what you need to do, when you need to do it.

There are a few ways to keep a to-do list. You can use pen and paper. You can run a command-line to-do list manager. Or, you can use a to-do list on your desktop.

In the first article in this series about GNOME Boxes, I explained how to get started with the virtualization application, and in the second article, I described GNOME Boxes' remote access capabilities. Here in the third installment, I will cover GNOME Boxes' snapshot functionality, which is a useful way to preserve data quickly.

You can add color to your Linux terminal using special ANSI encoding settings, either dynamically in a terminal command or in configuration files, or you can use ready-made themes in your terminal emulator. Either way, the nostalgic green or amber text on a black screen is wholly optional. This article demonstrates how you can make Linux as colorful (or as monochromatic) as you want.

Academic work fits nicely into the open source ethos: The higher the value of what you give away, the greater your academic prestige and earnings. Professors accomplish this by sharing their best ideas for free in journal articles in peer-reviewed literature. This is our currency, without a strong publishing record not only would our ability to progress in our careers degrade, but even our jobs could be lost (and the ability to get any other job).

Pandora Flexible Monitoring Solution (FMS) is all-purpose monitoring software, which means it can control network equipment, servers (Linux and Windows), virtual environments, applications, databases, and a lot more. It can do both remote monitoring and monitoring based on agents installed on the servers. You can get collected data in reports and graphs and raise alerts if something goes wrong.

In my article A beginner's guide to building DevOps pipelines with open source tools, I shared a story about building a DevOps pipeline from scratch. The core technology driving that initiative was Jenkins, an open source tool to build continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

In companies of every size, software is increasingly providing business value because of a shift in how technology teams define success. More than ever, they are defined by how the applications they build bring value to their customers. Tickets and stability at the cost of saying no are no longer the key value of IT. It's now about increasing developer velocity by partnering with the business.

Why is Python so beloved by programmers? It's open source. It's compatible with a variety of operating systems. It's readable for beginners. And it's powerful enough to use for developing complex applications. But best of all is its large community, making it easy to find a solution to whatever problem you’re having. This community is the reason we have such a large, diverse range of software packages available in the Python Package Index (PyPI) to extend and improve Python and solve the inevitable glitches that crop up.

Environment variables are global settings for your Linux, Mac, or Windows computer, stored for the system shell to use when executing commands. Many are set by default during installation or user creation.

For instance, your home directory is set as an environment variable when you log in. How it looks in PowerShell depends on your operating system.

On Windows:

Not too long ago, I spoke at a tech event in the Netherlands to an audience mostly made up of sysadmins. One of my topics was how sysadmins can increase the value they deliver to the organization they work for. I believe that among the most important factors for delivering value is for everyone to know the overall organization's priorities and goals, as well as the priorities and goals of the organization's development teams.

"We invented blogging, we invented podcasting, we invented the LIKE button…"

Rob Malda is only half-joking when he makes these claims in the closing minutes of my new documentary, Geeks in Cyberspace. Together with his friends Jeff Bates, Nate Oostendorp, and Kurt Demaagd, Malda helped usher in our present age of social media, inventing now-familiar conventions that we use every day on Reddit, Wikipedia, Facebook, and elsewhere.

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.

Shell scripting is an essential discipline for anyone in a sysadmin type of role, and the predominant shell in which people write scripts today is Bash. Bash comes as default on nearly all Linux distributions and modern MacOS versions and is slated to be a native part of Windows Terminal soon enough. Bash, you could say, is everywhere.

English essayist and politician Joseph Addison once said, "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Today, most (if not all) of us are training our brains by reading text on computer monitors, television screens, mobile devices, street signs, newspapers, magazines, and papers at work or school.

The most powerful aspects of an organization's culture live in the smallest individual gestures—sometimes no bigger than a peanut.

Not long ago, as I was sitting in the Dallas airport waiting for a delayed flight, I watched another passenger munch on some peanuts. Their shells fell all over the floor and, after a few minutes, the passenger kicked them into the aisle, presumably for the airport cleaning staff to collect later.