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Some folks like to rearrange furniture. Other folks like to try new shoes or redecorate their bedroom on the regular. Me? I try out Linux desktops.

After drooling over some of the incredible desktop environments I've seen online, I got curious about one window manager in particular: bspwm.

Whenever you're working with a group of programmers on a project, whether small or large, handling changes between multiple Git branches can become difficult. Sometimes, instead of combining an entire Git branch into a different one, you want to select and move a couple of specific commits. This procedure is known as "cherry-picking."

This article will cover the what, why, and how of cherry-picking.

So let's start.

On Linux, it's common to create shell scripts to automate repetitive tasks. Similarly, on FreeDOS, the open source implementation of old DOS operating systems, you can create a batch file containing several FreeDOS commands. Then you can run your batch file to execute each command in order.

Git is designed in part to enable experimentation. Once you know that your work is safely being tracked and safe states exist for you to fall back upon if something goes horribly wrong, you're not afraid to try new ideas. Part of the price of innovation, though, is that you're likely to make a mess along the way. Files get renamed, moved, removed, changed, and cut into pieces. New files are introduced. Temporary files that you don't intend to track take up residence in your working directory.

Learning to code involves learning both the programming logic and the syntax of a specific programming language. When I took my first programming class in college, the language taught was C++. The first code example, the basic "Hello World" program, looked like the example below.

They say software is eating the world, but it's equally clear that open source is taking over software.

Simply put, open source is a superior approach for building and distributing software because it provides important guarantees around how software can be discovered, tried, operated, collaborated on, and packaged. For those reasons, it is not surprising that it has taken over most of the modern data stack: Infrastructure, databases, orchestration, data processing, AI/ML, and beyond.

I have several computers. I've got a laptop at work, a workstation at home, a Raspberry Pi (or four), a Pocket CHIP, a Chromebook running various forms of Linux, and so on. I used to set up my user environment on each computer by more or less following the same steps, and I often told myself that I enjoyed that each one was slightly unique.

Whenever I start learning a new programming language, I focus on defining variables, writing a statement, and evaluating expressions. Once I have a general understanding of those concepts, I can usually figure out the rest on my own. Most programming languages have some similarities, so once you know one programming language, learning the next one is a matter of figuring out the unique details and recognizing the differences.

The reasons people contribute to free and open source (FOSS) projects has been a topic of much interest. However, the research on this topic dates back 10 or more years, and much has changed in the world since then. This article shares seven insights from a recent research study that revisited old motivation studies and asked open source contributors what motivates them today.

FreeDOS, the open source implementation of DOS, provides a lightweight operating system for running legacy applications on modern hardware (or in an emulator) and for updating hardware vendor fails with a Linux-compatible firmware flasher. Getting familiar with FreeDOS is not only a fun throwback to the computing days of the past, it's an investment into gaining useful computing skills. In this article, I'll look at some of the essential commands you need to know to work on a FreeDOS system.

Version control is an inseparable part of software developers' daily lives. It's hard to imagine any team developing software without using a version control tool. It's equally difficult to envision any developer who hasn't worked with (or at least heard of) Git. In the 2018 Stackoverflow Developer Survey, 87.2% of the 74,298 participants use Git for version control.

The need to be productive is ingrained in who we are as human beings on some level. We oftentimes have to do yoga and meditate and breathe deeply in order to consciously slow down our minds and bodies, but when we do it helps us focus and be more productive when the time comes. Instead of constantly moving and doing, we should take periods of thoughtful breaks... or veg out in front of the TV or a sunset. And sleep at night! Then, when we're ready again, we can tackle that to-do list. Rinse and repeat.

Two common tasks that new programmers need to learn are how to read from and write to files stored on a computer. Some examples are when data and configuration files created in one application need to be read by another application, or when a third application needs to write info, warnings, and errors to a log file or to save its results for someone else to use.

In the 21st century, we tend to take data storage for granted. We have lots of it, it's relatively affordable, and there are many different types of storage available. No matter how much cloud storage space you're given for free, there's nothing quite like having a physical hard drive for your really important (or really big, when you live on a slow network) data. However, few hard drives are sold right off the shelf, ready to use—in an ideal configuration, at least.

If you use Git every day, you probably make a lot of commits. If you're using Git every day in a project with other people, it's safe to assume that everyone is making lots of commits. Every day. And this means you're aware of how disorienting a Git log can become, with a seemingly eternal scroll of changes and no sign of what's been changed.

So how do you find out what file changed in a specific commit? It's easier than you think.

I recently started writing a game where you build words using letter tiles. To create the game, I needed to know the frequency of letters across regular words in the English language, so I could present a useful set of letter tiles. Letter frequency is discussed in various places, including on Wikipedia, but I wanted to calculate the letter frequency myself.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, IBM's Call for Code aims to solve climate change, the Linux Foundation launches a new signing service, and more.

Finding your way around a version control system can be tricky. It can be massively overwhelming for a newbie, but being well-versed with the terminology and the basics of a version control system like Git is one of the baby steps to start contributing to open source.

Being familiar with Git can also help you out of sticky situations in your open source journey. Git is powerful and makes you feel in control—there is not a single way in which you cannot revert to a working version.

When debugging code, you're often faced with figuring out when a variable changes. Without any advanced tools, you have the option of using print statements to announce the variables when you expect them to change. However, this is a very ineffective way because the variables could change in many places, and constantly printing them to a terminal is noisy, while printing them to a log file becomes unwieldy.

PyPI, the Python package index, provides a JSON API for information about its packages. This is essentially a machine-readable source of the same kind of data you can access while browsing the website. For example, as a human, I can head to the NumPy project page in my browser, click around, and see which versions there are, what files are available, and things like release dates and which Python versions are supported: