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I've written a few articles on how to be do something badly (or how not to do things), as I think they're a great way of adding a little humour to the process of presenting something. Some examples include:

As systems administrators know, there's a lot happening on modern computers. Applications run in the background, automated events wait to be triggered at a certain time, log files are written, status reports are delivered. Traditionally, these disparate processes have been managed and monitored with a collection of Unix tools to great effect and with great efficiency. However, modern computers are diverse, with local services running alongside containerized applications, easy access to clouds and the clusters they run on, real-time processes, and more data to process than ever.

When the personal computer was young, a household was likely to have one (or fewer) computers in it. Children played games on it during the day, and parents did accounting or programming or roamed through a BBS in the evening. Imagine a one-computer household today, though, and you can predict the conflict it would create. Everyone would want to use the computer at the same time, and there wouldn't be enough keyboard and mouse to go around.

Most people tend to take name services for granted. They are necessary to convert human-readable names, such as www.example.com, into IP addresses, like 93.184.216.34. It is easier for humans to recognize and remember names than IP addresses, and name services allow us to use names, and they also convert them to IP addresses for us.

Linux is famous for its commands. This is partially because nearly everything that Linux does can also be invoked from a terminal, but it's also that Linux as an operating system is highly modular. Its tools are designed to produce fairly specific results, and when you know a lot about a few commands, you can combine them in interesting ways for useful output. Learning Linux is equal parts learning commands and learning how to string those commands together in interesting combinations.

Anyone who spends a lot of time working with Git will eventually need to do some form of context switching. Sometimes this adds very little overhead to your workflow, but other times, it can be a real pain.

Let's discuss the pros and cons of some common strategies for dealing with context switching using this example problem:

Enterprise Data Analytics (EDA) is a web application that enables access to information through a simple, clear interface.

Recently, I demonstrated how to implement full-drive encryption on Linux with LUKS and the cryptsetup command. While encrypting a whole drive is useful in many cases, there are reasons you might not want to encode an entire drive. For instance, you might require a drive to work across several platforms, some of which may not have Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) integration.

The success of open source projects is largely carried by the pillars of the community and group collaborations. Without putting a stake in the ground to achieve strategic initiatives, an open source project can lose focus. Open source strategic initiatives should aim at solving impactful problems through collaboration involving the project's stakeholders.

Conway's Game of Life is a popular programming exercise to create a cellular automaton, a system that consists of an infinite grid of cells. You don't play the game in the traditional sense; in fact, it is sometimes referred to as a game for zero players.

Because so much of our personal and professional data is available online today, it is important for everyone—from professionals to general internet users—to learn the basics of security and privacy. As a student, I've been able to gain experience in this area through my school's CyberPatriot initiative, where I've had the opportunity to interact with industry experts to learn about cyber breaches and the basic steps to establish a system's security.

Many years ago, there was encryption software called TrueCrypt. Its source code was available, although there were no major claims that anyone had ever audited or contributed to it. Its author was (and remains to this day) anonymous. Still, it was cross-platform, easy to use, and really, really useful.

The free software movement famously got started because of a poorly designed printer. Decades later, printer and scanner manufacturers continue to reinvent the wheel, ignoring established and universal protocols. As a result, every now and again, you'll stumble onto a printer or scanner that just doesn't seem to work with your operating system.

The headline benefits of open source are widely known and well-articulated. Open source technologies provide enterprise-level scalability, performance, security, and reliability. Trust is there, and it's deserved. But what's less celebrated, other than by die-hard open source adherents, are the inner workings of the everyday community contributions building those macro benefits at the atomic level. For those offering open source technologies, it is the community's constant user-driven testing and hardening that forges those technologies into robust and proven solutions.

I first discovered Unix systems in the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at university. I liked it so much that I replaced the MS-DOS system on my home computer with the Linux operating system.

In my previous article, I introduced RudderStack, an open source, warehouse-first customer data pipeline. In this article, I demonstrate how easy Rudderstack makes it to set up and use event streams.

Building a tech stack is a major decision for every organization. While picking the right tools will set your team up for success, picking the wrong solutions or platforms can have devastating effects on productivity and profitability. To succeed in today's fast-paced world, organizations must make smart investments in digital solutions that enable them to move faster and increase operational agility.

Allowing talented leadership to excel in a more open organizational structure can determine a young company's success. But in order to transform into a more open organization, you'll need to provide that space for talented leaders to grow.

This doesn't always come easy to leaders. Ultimately, however, the only way to do it is to begin with yourself—and to address the issue not only your head but also your heart, your feelings.

If you use Git regularly, you might be aware that it has several reputations. It's probably the most popular version-control solution and is used by some of the biggest software projects around to keep track of changes to files. It provides a robust interface to review and incorporate experimental changes into existing documents.

Many people consider hard drives secure because they physically own them. It's difficult to read the data on a hard drive that you don't have, and many people think that protecting their computer with a passphrase makes the data on the drive unreadable.

This isn't always the case, partly because, in some cases, a passphrase serves only to unlock a user session. In other words, you can power on a computer, but because you don't have its passphrase, you can't get to the desktop, and so you have no way to open files to look at them.