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As many open source communities grow larger and older, they may face problems managing members' engagement. People turn towards metrics to understand large systems and prioritize resources, but there has not been a consensus set of metrics for understanding open source communities.

If you go to any hip product management conference, you'll hear about product teams. At a minimum, a product team has a product manager, but it often includes roles in marketing, technical architecture, and even user experience (UX).

Ansible is one of the primary tools in the world of automation and orchestration because of its broad usefulness and flexibility. However, those same traits are the very reason it can be difficult to get started with Ansible. It isn't a graphical application, and yet it also isn't a scripting or programming language.

The open source software ecosystem is a fascinating blend of personal passion projects and massive, collaborative corporate efforts. Sometimes there is even overlap when the passion projects are actually key components of the huge corporate projects or when a corporate project is abandoned by the original maintainers, but someone takes up the cause and makes it their personal passion project. Regardless of where an open source project falls on that spectrum, there is a lot of labor involved in the development and maintenance of open source projects.

There are a lot of factors to consider when investing in a home automation ecosystem. In my first article in this series, I explained why I picked Home Assistant, and in this article, I'll explain some of the foundational issues and technologies in home automation, which may influence how you approach and configure your Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

When things aren't working correctly in your Linux environment, the easiest thing to do is disable Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). Things suddenly begin to work, and you forget about it—but this is a common pitfall that means you've lost a very powerful security tool.

"The only way it’s all going to go according to plan is if you don’t learn anything." —Kent Beck

Experimentation is the foundation of the scientific method, which is a systematic means of exploring the world around us. But experimentation is not only reserved for the field of scientific research. It has a central place in the world of business too.

I've been using Rust for a little over six months now. I'm far from an expert, but I have stumbled across many, many gotchas and learned many, many things along the way; things that I hope will be of use to those who are learning what is easily my favourite programming language.

This is the third article in my miniseries for Rust newbs like me. You can find my other excursions into Rust in:

Btrfs has been available for Linux for several years, so you may already be familiar with it. If not, you may have questions about it, especially if you use Fedora Workstation (Btrfs is now its default filesystem). This article aims to help you get familiar with it and its advanced features, such as copy-on-write and checksums.

In getting started with Terraform, I used Terraform version 0.11. As some readers pointed out, this version lacks some significant features, so in this article, I'll explain how to update Terraform to the more feature-rich version 0.12.

In my Terraform for Kubernetes beginners article, I used Terraform 11, and in an upcoming article, I'll cover upgrading from Terraform 11 to 12. To prepare for that, in this article, I'll show you how to use tfenv, a tool that makes it much easier to convert from one version to another, as well as to manage multiple Terraform versions in your work environment.

From a security viewpoint, it's important to encrypt your sensitive data to protect it from prying eyes and hackers. Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) is a great tool and a common standard for Linux disk encryption. Because it stores all pertinent setup information in the partition header, it makes migrating data easy.

Serialization is the process of transforming data into a format that can be stored or transmitted and then reconstructing it. It's used all the time when developing applications or storing data in databases, in memory, or converting it into files.

I recently helped two junior developers at Labcodes understand serializers, and I thought it would be good to share my approach with Opensource.com readers.

In a recent Twitter thread, I self-identified as "some days Deanna, some days Riker." Others shared their own "Star Trek Spectrum," from Worf to O'Brien and McCoy to Neelix. That led me to think more about Deanna Troi: the half-human, half-Betazoid empath who served as Lieutenant Commander and the ship's counselor for most of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used more frequently in our daily lives, with systems such as Siri and Alexa becoming commonplace in many households. Many households themselves are "smart," powered by devices that can control your lights, heating and air, and even the music playing. And those music players are powered by AI that recommends songs and artists you may like.

Whether you are a senior leader or an individual contributor, you make decisions based on your personal, peers', and colleagues' experiences and feedback. If the people around you are evolving, you will grow with them, as will the organization you support. If the backgrounds and knowledge of the people around you are diverse and changing, you and your team will benefit.

I'm very excited about GNOME 3.38. The new version of the Linux desktop environment includes lots of new features and a noticeable performance boost. But in the background, mostly unnoticed, is another neat new thing about GNOME: the development of GNOME OS.

In early 2020, I wrote an article on three metrics for tracking and measuring offline, in-person community-building activities. Little did I (or the world) know then that offline, in-person activities of any kind would soon become unfeasible for the foreseeable future.

Cockpit is a service for Linux that provides a web-based interface for managing and monitoring hosts. It can be deployed in any size organization, even a small office, and it's a great way for home users to maintain the family IT infrastructure. I use it to manage and monitor all of the computers in my house—including Raspberry Pi.

Cockpit is a free and open source software project released under the LGPL v2.1+. It is sponsored by Red Hat and included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the RHEL Web Console.

Knative is an open source community project that adds components to Kubernetes for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications. It enables more productive development with less interaction with Kubernetes' infrastructure.