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Sysadmins are the heartbeat of many open source projects around the world. What would we do without them? 

So, once a year—or more if you're working on a team with a great outlook on life and positive culture—we take time out of our busy lives to say thank you.

"Thanks for all the stress, overtime, and dedication to the mission(s), me!" —Jim Salter

As a geek who always played with computers, a career after my masters in IT was a natural choice. So, I decided the sysadmin path was the right one. In the process of my career, I have grown quite familiar with the job interview process. Here is a look at what to expect, the general career path, and a set of common questions and my answers to them.

Have you ever downloaded the source code for a popular software project that required you to type the almost ritualistic ./configure; make && make install command sequence to build and install it? If so, you’ve used GNU Autotools. If you’ve ever looked into some of the files accompanying such a project, you’ve likely also been terrified at the apparent complexity of such a build system.

DevOps engineering is a hot career with many rewards. Whether you're looking for your first job after graduating or seeking an opportunity to reskill while leveraging your prior industry experience, this guide should help you take the right steps to become a DevOps engineer.

The ls command lists files on a POSIX system. It's a simple command, often underestimated, not in what it can do (because it really does only one thing), but in how you can optimize your use of it.

Have an old computer gathering dust in your basement? Why not put it to use? A backup machine could come in handy if your primary computer fails and you want to be online with a larger screen than your smartphone. Or it could act as a cheap secondary computer shared by the family. You could even make it into a retro gaming box.

You can take any computer up to a dozen years old and—with the right software—perform many of the same tasks you can with new machines. Open source software is the key.

Metrics dashboards enable DevOps teams to monitor the entire DevOps platform so they can respond to issues in real-time, which is critical in the event of downtime or disruption in the production environment or application services.

DevOps dashboards aggregate metrics from multiple observation tools to create monitoring reports for dev and ops teams. They also allow teams to track multiple metrics, such as service deployment times, bugs, errors, work items, backlogs, and more.

In open organizations, informal learning is critical to success. "Informal learning" accounts for all learning that occurs outside a training program, a classroom, or another formalized instruction setting. Unlike the learning in these formalized learning settings, informal learning is unstructured, personal, and voluntary.

The third season of the Command Line Heroes podcast continues its look at the history of the programming languages we depend on every day. Episode 3, released today, investigates the origin of JavaScript. Here's the unlikely story of how it happened.

While Twitter certainly isn't the most open source platform, the open source community on the social network brings a lot of great minds together on a daily basis. The site, as I see it, also democratizes access to these brilliant minds since we're all just one @ away.

Everybody knows that sysadmins are impossibly busy people. Consequently, it sometimes seems they are superhuman. The sysadmin's dirty secret, the same one shared by many open source users, is that they don't actually do all of the work it looks like they've done. One of the greatest tools in the sysadmin's kit is their ability to reuse work someone else has already done for them.

System administrators are critical to the reliable and successful operation of an organization and its network operations center and data center. A sysadmin must have expertise with the system's underlying platform (i.e., Windows, Linux) as well as be familiar with multiple areas including networking, backup, data restoration, IT security, database operations, middleware basics, load balancing, and more.

Sysadmin Appreciation Day is coming up this Friday, July 26. To help honor sysadmins everywhere, we want you to share your best gift ideas. What would be the best way a team member or customer could show their appreciation for you? As a sysadmin, what was the best gift you've ever received? We asked our writers the same question, and here are their answers:

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at database vendors going all in with open source, Facebook and Uber's latest open source releases, City of London's homebuilding app, and more!

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Recently, I bought and started using a Tuxedo Book BC1507, a Linux laptop computer. Ten years ago, if someone had told me that, by the end of the decade, I could buy top-quality, "penguin-ready" laptops from companies such as System76, Slimbook, and Tuxedo, I probably would have laughed. Well, now I'm laughing, but with joy!

HackMD.io is an open source, collaborative Markdown editor. It allows people to share, comment, and collaborate on documents. As open source software, users can choose between using the online platform or installing it as a local service using the upstream project CodiMD.

The system administrator of yesteryear jockeyed users and wrangled servers all day, in between mornings and evenings spent running hundreds of meters of hundreds of cables. This is still true today, with the added complexity of cloud computing, containers, and virtual machines.

I run a few static websites for my private projects on GitHub Pages. I'm absolutely happy with the service, as it supports custom domains, automatically redirects to HTTPS, and transparently installs SSL certificates (with automatic issuing via Let's Encrypt). It is very fast (thanks to Fastly's content delivery network) and is extremely reliable (I haven't had any issues for years).

The importance of open source—and specifically the maxim "release early, release often" (RERO)—can hardly be overstated. 

This approach born at the command line has impacted the world as organizations of every shape and size discover what open, collaborative processes can do. Look around. The evidence is everywhere: on our phones, in our cars, in schools and hospitals.

If we still built software the way we used to, innovations across these and countless other areas may never have seen the light of day.

I've been a gadget person as long as I can remember, so I was delighted when I discovered an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (CPX) in the swag bag I got at PyConUS in May. I became fascinated with these little devices last year, when Nina Zakharenko highlighted them in her All Things Open presentation, Five Things You Didn't Know Python Could Do, with Python-powered earrings.