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In 2020, Opensource.com's articles about continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) aimed to help you rethink your infrastructure with continuous delivery. If you're new to the CI/CD way of doing things or you need a refresher, read on for summaries of the top four CI/CD articles of 2020.

The advantage of plain text is that there’s no extra computer-specific information cluttering up your otherwise human-readable writing. The good thing about computers is that they’re programmable, and so as long as we humans agree to follow very specific conventions when writing, we can program computers to interpret human-readable text as secret instructions. For instance, by surrounding a word with two asterisks, we not only give a visual cue to humans that a word is significant, but we can also program computers to display the word in bold.

As in recent years, Python proved a popular programming language in 2020.

Each year, Opensource.com publishes various articles about Python to pique new users' interest and help long-time Pythonistas expand their skills. The following are Opensource.com's top 10 articles about Python in 2020.

If you're a fan of scripting languages like Bash, Python, or Ruby, you might find Lua interesting. Lua is a dynamically typed, lightweight, efficient, and embeddable scripting language with an API to interface with C. It runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and it can be used for everything from procedural programming to functional programming to data-driven programming. It can even be used for object-oriented programming through the clever use of arrays, or tables, used to mimic classes.

Recently, I stumbled on an old MacBook Pro 13" from late 2011, with a 125GB SSD and 8GB RAM. I've taken this machine on trips around the world, and back in the day, I ran many a session, workshop, or demo to share all the AppDev goodness from JBoss technologies.

After verifying that its battery works, charging it up, and reinstalling a new OS X, it turns out that the Safari browser version is limited to an old security specification, which means it can't connect to a lot of HTTPS sites now. This renders this solution defunct.

What to do with this old thing?

The Semitic root q-d-m in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic is usually associated with moving forward or making progress. The Arabic word taqaddum (تقدّم) means "progress." Progress is important. As every feel-good movie will tell you, the journey is as important as the destination.

The Haiku operating system is a bold but successful attempt at reviving an old OS called BeOS. In the 1990s, BeOS was positioned to become the foundation for the next evolution of the Apple Mac line of computers. Back in the 1990s, Apple Inc. was poised to acquire BeOS as its next generation operating system. At the last minute, however, Apple decided the price was too steep and acquired the UNIX-based NeXT operating system instead (and so Mac OS X was born).

There are a couple of ways to learn a programming language. If you're new to coding, you usually learn some basic computer coding concepts and try to apply them. If you already know how to code in another language, you relearn how coding concepts are expressed in the new language.

In this series, we're writing the same application in different programming languages to compare how various languages work and to show how using a standard test program is a great way to learn new ways to program.

When you learn a new programming language, it's good to focus on the things they have in common. Variables, expressions, and statements are the basis of most programming languages. Once you understand these concepts, you can start figuring the rest out.

I’m a fan of text editors that make it easy for you to learn how to use them. GNU nano is my favorite example of this: you launch nano, and you see a list of the most common commands along the bottom of the window throughout your entire session. Joe’s Own Editor (that’s joe for short) is another great example.

2020 was the year remote work became the norm. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people and companies shifted to "temporary" remote work, though many have now extended it indefinitely. As remote work will be the norm for the foreseeable future, here’s a review of some of the many articles published on Opensource.com regarding remote work practices, tools, and activities to manage this new normal.

I love a good notebook. I usually get one or two blank notebooks from technical conferences each year, and I spend the journey home deciding what I’ll fill the empty pages with. Sometimes, it’s notes about some new open source technology; other times, it’s ideas for new games, or a collection of dungeons for my D&D groups, or ideas for a fictional world or story. The ideas tend to flow freely when I have a blank notebook in front of me, because it’s empty, and nature abhors a vacuum.

Many Linux distributions bundle Vim as their default text editor. This appeals to many longtime Linux users, and those who don’t like it can change it promptly after install anyway. Vim is a funny editor, though, as it’s one of the few that opens to a mode that doesn’t permit text entry. That’s a puzzling choice for any user, and it’s confusing for a new one.

Throughout this past year, we've shared top open source news to keep everyone updated on what's happening in the world of open source. In case you missed any of the headlines, catch up on 10 of the open source news events that grabbed our readers' attention in 2020.

There’s a somewhat obscure feature in Linux and Unix shells that allows you to open a sort of do-while loop for the cat command. It’s called the heredoc, and it enables you to have, more or less, a text editor no matter what shell you’re using. The syntax is:

The COVID-19 pandemic required a paradigm change in education in 2020, as face-to-face interaction between teachers and students was largely replaced by remote learning beginning in the spring. Opensource.com writers helped teachers, students, and families around the world rise to the challenge with examples of open software tools fueling innovation in teaching and learning.

Looking back through Opensource.com's articles about DevOps in 2020, there was a bit of something for everyone—from people starting the DevOps journey to seasoned DevOps veterans. The articles focused on testing, software methodologies, and DevOps' most important part: the people. Here are the top 10 DevOps articles of 2020.

Beautiful open source text editors are pretty common these days, between Adobe’s Brackets, Microsoft’s VSCode, and GitHub’s Atom. Each of these seem to offer similar experiences: a modern interface, easily installable plugins, and a big brand-name sponsor. And they’re all actually really good. So what sets Atom apart from any other hyper-modern text editor?

The Rust language is getting more and more popular, as the combination of memory safety and zero-cost abstractions makes it a good fit for handling many tasks.

In addition, frequent releases, consideration for development ergonomics, and high-quality documentation are leading more people to learn Rust.

Whether you're new to Rust or have been using it for a while, you'll learn something new in Opensource.com's top 10 articles about Rust in 2020.

Look! I wrote a virtual reality (VR) server and published it on GitHub! But why?

Well, I'm your typical introverted hacker. I like to play with technology. Whenever something new comes out, I have to lay my hands on it and get them dirty. So, when I gifted myself Oculus Quest last year, I played a few games before I wanted to code something myself. And guess what? Everything is proprietary!