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Are you looking for cool gifts for people on your holiday shopping list or ideas for your own wishlist? If so, consider one of the ten suggestions below. Each of these gift suggestions connects in some way to the open source ethos. From DIY projects to computers to books, this list provides gift suggestions that foster creativity, learning, and exploring.

When I started writing, I did it primarily for the purpose of documenting for myself. When it comes to programming, I'm incredibly forgetful, so I began to write down useful code snippets, special characteristics, and common mistakes in the programming languages I use. This article perfectly fits the original idea as it covers common use cases of formatting when printing to console from C++.

[Download the C++ std::cout cheat sheet]

It's the time of year when we focus more intently on thanks and giving. Our community has shared what that means to them.

For decades, Microsoft Exchange has ruled the market for email and groupware services. This top dog dominates the corporate world, and the omnipresent Outlook mail client has become the de facto standard for groupware. Since Exchange is closely integrated with Microsoft's Office products, users have access to a wide variety of productivity software and features, whether they're using a desktop or a mobile client.

What is open core? Is a project open core, or is a business open core? That's debatable. Like open source, some view it as a development model, others view it as a business model. As a product manager, I view it more in the context of value creation and value capture.

The applications you write execute a lot of code, in a way that's essentially invisible. So how can you know:

The holiday season is upon us once again, and this year I decided to celebrate in an open source way. Like a particular famous holiday busybody, I have a long list (and I do intend to check it twice) of holiday tasks: create a greeting card (with addressed envelopers) to send to family and friends, make a photo montage or video to a suitably festive song, and decorate my virtual office. There are plenty of open source applications and resources making my job easier. Here's what I use.

Tekton is a Kubernetes-native continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) framework. It allows you to create containerized, composable, and configurable workloads declaratively through Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD).

Have media files on your computer? You can likely reclaim significant disk space by storing that data in more space-efficient file formats.

This article demonstrates how to use Linux line commands to perform the most common space-saving conversions. I use line commands because they give you complete control over compression and format conversion features. Also, you'll need to use line commands if you want to write scripts. That allows you to develop programs that are custom-tailored to your own unique needs.

Most of the time, a terminal is a productivity powerhouse. But there's more to the terminal than commands and configurations. Among all the outstanding open source software out there, some of it has been written just for fun. I've written about fun commands before, but this article is about just one: the venerable cowsay command.

Search is a must-have for any website or application. A simple search widget can allow users to comb through your entire blog. Or allow customers to browse your inventory. Building a custom photo gallery? Add a search box. Website search functionality is available from a variety of third-party vendors. Or you can take the DIY approach and build the entire backend to answer search API calls.

Open source projects need developers to survive, and one of the primary sources of developers is a project's user base. I'm involved with the openEuler project, where understanding the conversion rate of contributors from user to developer is a key metric. This article takes a look at the open source community from a hierarchical perspective, hoping to provide a new dimension to observe a community's health through data.

Making things happen on a regular and predictable schedule is important on computers. It's important because, as humans, we can sometimes be bad at remembering to do things reliably because we get distracted, have too much on our minds, or we're on holiday. Computers are really good at doing things on a schedule, but a human has to program the computer before the computer takes action.

It has become commonplace in the software industry for programmers of all flavors to build careers writing code that releases to the commons with open source licenses. Industry headhunters often demand access to the code to vet future employees. Those that focus their career on open source development get rewarded. According to payscale.com, Linux sysadmins earn more than their Windows counterparts, indicating better pay and job security for jobs in open source software. There's also a good feeling (maybe even karma) that comes with sharing your work.

Server and application logging is an important facility for developers, operators, and security teams to understand an application's state running in their production environment.

Logging allows operators to determine if the applications and the required components are running smoothly and detect if something unusual is happening so they can react to the situation.

The Linux command line can be the home of power users and sysadmins. However, Linux is more than just a lot of hard work. Linux was developed by fun-loving people who created an array of comical commands. Try playing around with these yourself when you want a smile.

For no reason whatsoever, you can cause a steam locomotive to zip across your terminal using the sl command. Install Steam Locomotive with your package manager. For example, on Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install sl

Are you looking for a way to quickly copy files from your iPhone or Android mobile device to your Linux computer or from your Linux computer to your devices? I recently discovered an open source application that's easy to install and makes transferring files as simple as a QR code.

The qrcp project provides a command that generates a QR code in your terminal that allows you to send or receive files to your computer over the network.

Knative is an open source project based on the Kubernetes platform for building, deploying, and managing serverless workloads that run in the cloud, on-premises, or in a third-party data center. Google originally started it with contributions from more than 50 companies.

Knative allows you to build modern applications which are container-based and source-code-oriented.