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Learning a new programming language can be fun. Whenever I try to learn a new one, 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 in it.

Sometimes you just have to edit text on the cloud. Maybe you're using a computer you don't own to work on a document you want to keep. Maybe you need to collaborate with other people on a shared document. Or maybe your primary computing interface is a web browser, and you have no interest in using local applications or local storage.

Businesses all over the world are facing extraordinary challenges, and adapting to new ways of work is essential to their survival and progress. The importance of IT workers and systems can't be overstated; with companies looking for innovative ways to adjust, often with reduced resources, automation is increasingly central to day-to-day operations.

Being the default text editor is a thankless job. People usually regard a default text editor almost as a demo app—a slightly elevated "hello world" example of how an application on that platform is meant to run. Users resort to the default text editor in the rare occasions they need to dump some text into a file they’ll probably never look at again. For "serious" work, they turn to a word processor or an IDE, or an editor in the terminal, or at least a different text editor that has to be downloaded and installed like a "real" application.

Services, services, services. A service is a huge part of computing. You're reading this article on a service. Your computer is running services. The internet is filled with them.

On Linux, the standard way of running and managing services is through the systemd utility and the command systemctl. Its usage is fairly simple: you just need to know the name of the service you want to manage, then you can use this command to start or stop the service, check its status, or do other functions:

In the first article in this series, I introduced Home Assistant and why you might be interested in it. In short, Home Assistant is an automation hub for some of the most common smart devices on the market today. It enables centralized coordination of disparate hardware. By using it, you no longer have to choose suboptimal tech from a single vendor to manage your smart home from a single app.

As part of my role as a principal communication strategist at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends. Here are some of my and their favorite articles from that update.

In the first part of this article series—an extended review of the book How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley—I examined Ridley's characterization of innovation: it's gradual, incremental, and collective, and involves extensive collaboration between parties.

The X11 graphic server, distributed by X.org, has a few token applications that show how to program with its provided tools. These range from the TWM desktop to the silly but hypnotic Xeyes. It also includes a text editor called Xedit, a seemingly simple application with enough hidden features to make it a serious editor.

The KDE Plasma Desktop has a lot to offer—a great desktop, a flexible file manager, and tightly integrated applications. However, it can be easy to overlook its default text editors, one of which is Kate. On December 14, 2020, Kate turns 20 years old, and in its two decades of development, it has achieved a perfect balance between a straightforward editor and a modest Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

GNU Emacs is a very famous editor, but not everyone knows that emacs is a tradition of text editors rather than just one specific application. The term "emacs" is actually a portmanteau of "Editor Macros," and the first one was programmed in 1976 as a set of macros for the TECO editor.

When I saw Stack Overflow Chief Product Officer (CPO) Teresa Dietrich on the list of speakers at the All Things Open conference this year, I jumped at the chance to get an update.

We all know the value of Stack Overflow: the information that's been created there over the past twelve years is nothing short of vital for programmers, developers, and other technologists. Just the other day one of our contributors shared how critical it was to his process for starting to learn a new programming language quickly.

In June 2020, the Secretary-General of the United Nations published a "Roadmap for Digital Cooperation." In this report, he expanded on recommendations made a year before, calling on all actors, including the Member States, the United Nations system, the private sector, and others, to promote digital public goods. He says to realize the benefits of increased internet connectivity, open source projects in the form of digital public goods must be at the center.

Super Productivity is a to-do app for people that spend a lot of their time working from a computer. Its philosophy is that disciplined, focused work and cutting yourself some slack benefit from each other, rather than being on opposite sides of the spectrum.

Whether you know it as Vim, Neovim, gVim, nvi, or even Elvis, the quintessential Unix editor is easily Vi. Included in probably every Linux and BSD distribution, Vi is a lightweight and minimalist text editor that many users love for its simple and succinct keyboard shortcuts and dual-mode design.

I'm a habitual Emacs user. I didn't choose Emacs as much as it chose me. Back when I was first learning about Unix, I stumbled upon a little-known feature in a strange application called Emacs, which was apparently hidden away on my computer. Legend had it (and was proven true) that if you typed emacs into a terminal, pressed Alt+X, and typed tetris, you could play a falling-blocks game.

In the year since the Raspberry Pi 4 was released, I've seen many tutorials (like this and this) and articles on how well the 4GB model works with container platforms such as Kubernetes (K8s), Lightweight Kubernetes (K3s), and Docker Swarm. As I was doing research, I read that Arm processors are "first-class citizens" in OpenStack.

ONLYOFFICE Docs is a self-hosted open source alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs for collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in real time.

The following are the five most important ways ONLYOFFICE Docs helps organize my collaborative work.

You may have heard about Emacs and Vim and Nano, the quintessential Linux text editors, but Linux has an abundance of open source text editors, and it's my goal to spend December giving 31 of them a fair go.

In this article, I look at Jed, a terminal-based editor featuring a handy drop-down menu, which makes it especially easy for users who are new to terminal editors, as well as those who just don't like remembering keyboard combinations for every function.

In 2020, our ways of living and working were turned completely upside down in a matter of days. As COVID-19 began to spread across the globe, we brought our companies home, and staying connected to our colleagues, friends, and family online became a critical necessity.