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Spreadsheets can be very useful—and not just for managing your finances. That said, desktop spreadsheets have their limitations. The biggest is that you need to be at your computer to use one. On top of that, collaborating on a spreadsheet can quickly become a messy affair.

Enter EtherCalc, an open source, web-based spreadsheet. While not as fully featured as a desktop spreadsheet, EtherCalc packs enough features for most people.

In my previous post, I walked Mac users through the steps they’ll take to install Elasticsearch, the world’s most popular enterprise search engine. (Here's a separate article for Linux users.) Its natural language processing power makes Elasticsearch excel at finding details within datasets.

Security is one of the most important considerations for running in any environment, and using open source software is a great way to handle security without going over budget in your corporate environment or for your home setup. It is easy to talk about the concepts of security, but it's another thing to understand the tools that will get you there. This tutorial explains how to set up security using Jenkins with Anchore.

We’re always amazed to find and hear what people are achieving with Ansible. Naturally, we get lots of feedback from customers, but more often we find it is the community who pushes Ansible even further.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. This format is a popular method of storing data in key-value arrangements so it can be parsed easily later. Don’t let the name fool you, though: You can use JSON in Python—not just JavaScript—as an easy way to store data, and this article demonstrates how to get started.

First, take a look at this simple JSON snippet:

Continuous learning refers to the ongoing, career-driven, intentional learning process people undertake to develop themselves. For people who consider themselves continuous learners, learning never stops—and these people see learning opportunities in everyday experiences. Engaging with one's colleagues in debate, reflecting on feedback, scouring the internet for a solution to a frustrating problem, trying something new, or taking a risk are all examples of the informal learning activities one can perform on the job.

What is POSIX, and why does it matter? It's a term you've likely seen in technical writing, but it often gets lost in a sea of techno-initialisms and jargon-that-ends-in-X. I emailed Dr. Richard Stallman (better known in hacker circles as RMS) to find out more about the term's origin and the concept behind it.

If you are a programmer or a student pursuing computer science or a similar discipline, sooner or later, you will encounter the term "software design pattern." According to Wikipedia, "a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design." Here is my take on the definition: When you have been working on a coding project for a while, you often begin to think, "Huh, this seems redundant.

Have you ever daydreamed about what type of movie "A Day in the Life of [Your Name Here]" would be? As a sysadmin or other IT professional, your day can vary depending on what issues arise. Does your workday typically play out as planned, or does it tend to go off script? Which movie genre best describes your typical day?

Superhero blockbuster: When you save the day after Thanos deletes the world's DNS records, you might feel like one of the Avengers.

The game is changing for the IT ops community, which means the rules of the past make less and less sense. Organizations need accurate, understandable, and actionable metrics in the right context to measure operations performance and drive critical business transformation.

The more customers use modern tools and the more variation in the types of incidents they manage, the less sense it makes to smash all those different incidents into one bucket to compute an average resolution time that will represent ops performance, which is what IT has been doing for a long time.

When I decided I wanted to play with color this summer, I thought about the fact that colors are usually depicted on a color wheel. This is usually with pigment colors rather than light, and you lose any sense of the variation in color brightness or luminosity.

DevOps teams appreciate using DevOps processes, especially in multi- and hybrid cloud infrastructures, for many reasons. For one thing, DevOps breaks down barriers and enables agile software development and continuous delivery of IT operations.

If you’re in quality assurance, system administration, or (believe it or not) media production, you might have heard some variation of the term gold master, golden image, or master image, and so on. It’s a term that has made its way into the collective consciousness of anyone involved in creating one perfect model and then producing many duplicates from that mold. That’s what a gold master, or golden image, is: The virtual mold from which you cast your distributable models.

Elasticsearch is an open source, full-text search engine developed in Java. Users upload datasets as JSON files. Then, Elasticsearch stores the original document before adding a searchable reference to the document in the cluster’s index.

Less than nine years after its creation, Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine. Elastic released its latest update—version 7.2.0 —on June 25, 2019.

We asked members of our DevOps team to talk about their experience as introverts and to give extroverts some advice. Before we get into their responses, though, let’s first define the term.

If you're a developer creating binary packages, like an RPM, DEB, Flatpak, or Snap, you have to compile code for a variety of different target platforms. Typical targets include 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and ARM. You could do your builds on different physical or virtual machines, but that means maintaining several systems. Instead, you can use the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to cross-compile, producing binaries for several different architectures from a single build machine.

In the beginning, there were conferences. Over time, as those conferences grew, attendees needed ways to identify each other. This need gave us the conference badge.

No one knows what the first conference badges looked like, but we can be confident that they were relatively simple affairs. Over time, paper was put into plastic sleeves, which eventually became information printed on hard plastic. Sometimes that plastic wasn’t even rectangular.

In this opinion article, you will find a set of suggestions for the inclusion of enterprise technology into software engineering courses. This piece goes through the difficulties that students face and proposes simplifications successfully used in the past. The continual advancement of enterprise technologies leads to a simplifying of the inclusion process in education.

The second episode of this Command Line Heroes season 3 drops today and it sent me back through a nostalgic look at the idea of first programming languages.

If you're keen to learn Elasticsearch, the famous open source search engine based on the open source Lucene library, then there's no better way than to install it locally. The process is outlined in detail on the Elasticsearch website, but the official instructions have a lot more detail than necessary if you're a beginner. This article takes a simplified approach.