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When people learn that I work as an open source evangelist (focusing on syslog-ng and sudo), they often ask me what it's like to represent such well-known names in the Linux world. My short answer: It's good!

I am part of research and development, so it is never boring. I feel that I make an impact when people implement what they learn from me and when the feedback I collect from users influences the development of the product.

Sometimes you need the short version. You know what you want to do and you just can't recall exactly how to do it. That's when cheat sheets come in handy. In this article, I suggest a cheat sheet to get you going with MariaDB and MySQL. This cheat sheet is great for the occassional database user. Next, I have listed two Raspberry Pi cheat sheets. The first gets you started with this single-board computer. Once you're comfortable with the basics, turn it into a home lab and begin working with Kubernetes container management.

If you're a programmer and you want to put a certain functionality in your software, you start by thinking of ways to implement it—such as writing a method, defining a class, or creating new data types. Then you write the implementation in a language that the compiler or interpreter can understand. But what if the compiler or interpreter does not understand the instructions as you had them in mind, even though you're sure you did everything right? What if the software works fine most of the time but causes bugs in certain circumstances?

If you had at least one chance to attend business and technologies conferences recently, you probably saw lots of DevOps strategies, Agilist, and DevSecOps engineers around the digital transformation track. No matter what business you work in, it’s no secret that DevOps is a big trigger to craft new companies. It is also used to optimize existing resources, from the IT infrastructure to workflow processes and cultural changes.

Productivity apps can really make your workflow much easier. In this article, I'll share a few of the open source applications I have used to streamline my workflow and increase my overall productivity. All of the productivity applications in this article are free Linux productivity applications.

Tomboy is a simple note-taking application that can be used on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's open source under the GNU LGPLv2.

I taught myself about programming back in elementary school. My first programs were on the Apple II, but eventually, I learned C by reading books and practicing. And the best way to practice programming is to write sample programs that help exercise your new knowledge.

It can be hard to find meaningful gifts for relatives that already have almost everything. My wife and I have given our parents "experiences" to try something novel, such as going to a themed restaurant or seeing a concert, but as our parents get older, it becomes more difficult. This year was no exception—until I thought about a way open source could give them something really special.

Out in the blogosphere, which sings the virtues of infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, code reviews, and testing regimes, it is easy to forget that such a well-engineered ivory tower is an ideal, not a reality. Imperfect systems haunt us, but we must ship something.

There are few towers less ivory than those created by gluing together APIs in the course of system automation. It is a brittle world. The pressures are enormous to get it "working," get it shipped, and move on.

Michael Boelen is very active in computer security. He is the author of the popular open source security tools Rootkit Hunter (rkhunter) and Lynis, and he blogs about Linux security on Linux Audit and evaluates security tools on Linux Security Expert.

The first compiled programming language I learned was Fortran 77. While growing up, I taught myself how to write programs in BASIC on the Apple II and later in QBasic on DOS. But when I went to university to study physics, I learned Fortran.

Fortran used to be quite common in scientific computing. And once upon a time, all computer systems had a Fortran compiler. Fortran used to be as ubiquitous as Python is today. So if you were a physics student like me, working in the 1990s, you learned Fortran.

Here we are again at the end of another year with a great set of articles about Ansible from Opensource.com. I thought it would be nice to review them in a series of progressively advancing topics. I hope to help stimulate the interest of people just getting started with Ansible. There were also a series of summary articles, which I've included for your casual follow-up.

The end of the year is the perfect time to look back and explore where we've been and where we're going in the Kubernetes world. I particularly want to focus on the ecosystem that formed around Kubernetes in 2020, which several great articles on Opensource.com covered. I'll review them in the order they were published.

All Things Open, a technology conference held in October every year, is always a wonderful learning experience. For 2020, the conference shifted to an online format, which had its ups and downs. The chance encounters with acquaintances in the hallways and having lunch with friends were noticeably absent, but the learning experience was as good as always. Honestly, in some ways, it was better because everyone got a front-row seat, and there were no standing-room-only talks.

If we define "work" as any contribution that receives any kind of reward, then work is—and always has been—one of the major factors that define who we are. It is a major aspect of our lives. Throughout our work (whatever that may be for us), we meet friends, identify sources of intellectual stimulation and emotional fulfillment, grow, and feel at our most creative and innovative. To our families, friends, communities and societies, work is extremely important. We should not take work—or its role in our lives—lightly or for granted.

I have always been fascinated with the night sky. When I was younger, the only reference materials available were books, and they seemed to depict a sky that looked different from the one I saw from my home.

I love Python, and I've been learning it for a while now. Some time ago, I wrote a Python script where I needed to resize a bunch of images while at the same time keeping the aspect ratio (the proportions) intact. So I looked around and found Pillow, a Python imaging library and "friendly fork" of an old library just called PIL. 

I have been writing a series of articles about solving a nice, small, and somewhat unusual problem in different programming languages (Groovy, Python, and Java so far).

As we ring in a new year that many hope will look a lot different than 2020, I propose we try to keep a few things that difficult year gave us:

There are a lot of text editors available. There are those that run in the terminal, in a GUI, in a browser, and in a browser engine. Many are very good, and some are great. But sometimes, the most satisfying answer to any question is the one you build yourself.

Git is an essential tool in the open source developer's toolkit. This powerful version-control system has a lot of complex features. Not all of the features are necessary to use Git, but knowing more about how Git works makes working with Git easier.

During 2020, Opensource.com published many excellent articles about Git, including the top 10 covered below. Each article provides tips and tricks for improving and enhancing your Git experience.