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Hexdump is a utility that displays the contents of binary files in hexadecimal, decimal, octal, or ASCII. It’s a utility for inspection and can be used for data recovery, reverse engineering, and programming.

From its early days, the availability of source code was one of the defining characteristics of open source software. Indeed, Brian Behlendorf of the Apache web server project, an early open source software success, favored "source code available software."

Your environment is everything, especially when you're coding. Decisions about what text editor or IDE you'll be using are critical to productivity. But what about your environment beyond the screen?

As a person who normally manages software development teams, over the years I’ve come to care about metrics quite a bit. Time after time, I’ve found myself leading teams using one project platform or another (Jira, GitLab, and Rally, for example) generating an awful lot of measurable data. From there, I’ve promptly invested significant amounts of time to pull useful metrics out of the platform-of-record and into a format where we could make sense of them, and then use the metrics to make better choices about many aspects of development.

Developer relations, in all its iterations, is built on the foundation of open source community management, says Mary Thengvall, an author, consultant, and community builder. It encompasses a variety of roles and titles, including developer advocate, community manager, and developer evangelist/technical ambassador.

Copying documents used to require a dedicated staff member in offices, and then a dedicated machine. Today, copying is a task computer users do without a second thought. Copying data on a computer is so trivial that copies are made without you realizing it, such as when dragging a file to an external drive.

In "Failure is a feature in blameless DevOps," I discussed the central role of failure in delivering quality by soliciting feedback. This is the failure agile DevOps teams rely on to guide them and drive development. Test-driven development (TDD) is the conditio sine qua non of any agile DevOps value stream delivery.

I first discovered Linux in 1993, when I was an undergraduate physics student who wanted the power of Big Unix on my home PC. I remember installing my first Linux distribution, SoftLanding Systems (SLS), and exploring the power of Linux on my ‘386 PC. I was immediately impressed. Since then, I’ve run Linux at home—and even at work.

Email remains a fact of life. Despite all its warts, it's still the best way to send information to most people, especially in automated ways that allow messages to queue for recipients.

Markdown is a widely adopted plain-text formatting syntax used to specify HTML rendering. It is also an essential skill to learn if you want to contribute to open source software. 

Like many concepts in open source communities, there are multiple, domain-specific distributions of Markdown. CommonMark provides an unambiguous rendering specification for defined Markdown incantations while many communities offer extensions to the official specification.

Because scrum and kanban both fall under the agile methodology umbrella, many people confuse them or think they're the same thing. There are differences, however. For one, scrum is more specific to software development teams, while kanban is used by many kinds of teams and focuses on providing a visual representation of an agile team's workflow. Some argue that kanban is about getting things done, and scrum is about talking about getting things done.

The pushd and popd commands are built-in features of the Bash shell to help you "bookmark" directories for quick navigation between locations on your hard drive. You might already feel that the terminal is an impossibly fast way to navigate your computer; in just a few key presses, you can go anywhere on your hard drive, attached storage, or network share. But that speed can break down when you find yourself going back and forth between directories, or when you get "lost" within your filesystem.

Corteza is an open source, self-hosted digital work platform for growing an organization's productivity, enabling its relationships, and protecting its work and the privacy of those involved. The project was developed entirely in the public domain by Crust Technology. It has four core features: customer relationship management, a low-code development platform, messaging, and a unified workspace.

Do you recognize the following scenario? I do, because a manager once stifled my passion and innovation to the point I was anxious to make decisions, take risks, and focus on what's important: "uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it" (Agile Manifesto, 2001).

Developer: "The UX hypothesis failed. Users did not respond well to the new navigation experience, resulting in 80% of users switching back to the classic navigation."

When the Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at the end of June, I wasted no time. I ordered two Raspberry Pi 4 Starter Kits the same day from CanaKit. The 1GB RAM version was available right away, but the 4GB version wouldn't ship until July 19th. Since I wanted to try both, I ordered them to be shipped together.

Is there an endangered species list for programming languages? If there is, Command Line Heroes suggests that Perl is somewhere between vulnerable and critically endangered. The dominant language of the 1990s is the focus of this week's podcast (Season 3, Episode 4) and explores its highs and lows since it was introduced over 30 years ago.

Tired of creating and displaying presentation slides using LibreOffice Impress or various slightly geeky tools and frameworks? Instead, consider running the slides for your next talk from a terminal window.

In both personal and organizational life, energy levels are important. This is no less true of open organizations. Consider this: When you're tired, you'll have trouble adapting when challenges arise. When your energy is low, you'll have trouble collaborating with others. When you're feeling fatigued, building and energizing an open organization community is difficult.

If you’re on your way to work, but you stop by a deli for breakfast first, you don’t go back home after breakfast so you can restart your journey. Instead, you continue from where you are because you understand where your office is located relative to your current location. Navigating your computer is the same way. If you change your working directory in a terminal to a subdirectory, such as Pictures, you don’t necessarily have to go home again just to make your way into Documents. Instead, you use a relative path.

In our second monthly Ansible Around The Web, we're sharing a smorgasbord of useful Ansible information for your delectation. Read on to find stories and videos relating to databases, security, VMware, Infoblox, and Windows!

If you find 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.

On with the show…