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Home automation is a slippery slope; you have been warned! In this multipart series, I will discuss home automation using the open source project Home Assistant. This introductory article will cover my journey to Home Assistant, what the application does, and why it's important.

"Package manager" is a generic name for software to install, upgrade, and uninstall applications. Commands like dnf or apt on Linux, or pkg_add on BSD, or even pip on Python and luarocks on Lua, make it trivial for users to add new applications to their system. Once you've tried it, you're likely to find it hard to live without, and it's a convenience every operating system ought to include. Not all do, but the open source community tends to ensure the best ideas in computing are propagated across all platforms.

Fedora 33 just came out, and I installed it right away. Among the many features in this new version of the Linux distribution is the latest GNOME desktop. GNOME 3.38 was released in September 2020, and I'm loving it.

You don't have to work at a huge company to justify using a load balancer. You might be a hobbyist, self-hosting a website from a couple of Raspberry Pi computers. Perhaps you're the server administrator for a small business; maybe you do work for a huge company. Whatever your situation, you can benefit from using the HAProxy load balancer to manage your traffic.

Minishift is a tool that helps you run OKD (Red Hat's open source OpenShift container platform) locally by launching a single-node OKD cluster inside a virtual machine. It is powered by Kubernetes, which is one of my favorite things to talk about.

If you like to tinker with technology, you may be familiar with programmable microcontroller boards, such as AdaFruit's Circuit Playground Express and the BBC Micro:bit. Now there's a new programming option for you to try: MicroBlocks. It's a simple Scratch-like programming interface that works well with several microcontrollers, including those two.

For the longest time, it seemed the only thing any sysadmin cared about was automation. Recently, though, the mantra seems to have changed from automation to orchestration, leading many puzzled admins to wonder: "What's the difference?"

In the first article of this series, I examined the nature of the innovation process in great detail. I also discussed some sources of resistance to it.

I was introduced to open source by my husband, a long-term Unix/Linux user. When he encouraged me to attend the Triangle Linux Users Group (TriLUG), a local meetup in the Raleigh, NC, area, I was quite intimidated, as I was one of a handful of women in attendance. But the more I learned about open source, the more intrigued I became.

I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a tabletop role-playing game in which players take control of mythic heroes to explore imaginary dungeons and fight make-believe dragons. D&D players often like to draw maps on big sheets of butcher's paper, or buy and craft evocative set pieces, so that they can track their progress through the realms with gaming miniatures.

This summer, eLife was pleased to launch Executable Research Articles (ERAs) in partnership with Stencila, allowing authors to post computationally reproducible versions of their published papers in the open-access journal.

The Jupyter project offers interactive ways to write software with technology like JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook. This software is commonly used for data analysis, but what you might not know (and the Jupyter community didn't expect) is how many things you can do with it.

Here are my top five unexpected and creative ways to use Jupyter.

Git's git config command (hereafter referred to as "config") enables you to set repository or global options for Git. It has many options, and one of them, includeIf, is handy when you have dual roles using Git, for example, working full time as a developer and contributing to open source projects in your spare time.

This strange time has given us, on one hand, the chance to slow down, yet on the other, it's busier than ever. Especially if you have others in your life to care for in addition to yourself. But you can't give from an empty cup, so, this list of evening rituals is focused on what you can do for yourself right after you turn the computer off, shut the laptop, or say goodbye to the last virtual meeting of the day.

Open source software is everywhere these days—which is great—but how can you be sure that you should trust the software you've downloaded to do what you want? The area of software supply chain management—of which this discussion forms a part—is fairly newly visible in the industry but is growing in importance. I'm going to consider a particular example.

JavaScript is a popular programming language that started out as a single-threaded, synchronous language, meaning that one step runs after another step without waiting to fetch any external resources or perform any lengthy calculation or process. If the script requires such a resource or calculation, this synchronous behavior results in an error. This blocks all other processes in the queue from running whether or not they were dependent on the step that produced the error.

Flutter is a popular open source toolkit for building cross-platform apps. In "Create a mobile app with Flutter," I demonstrated how to install Flutter on Linux and create your first app. In this article, I'll show you how to add a list of items in your app, with each item opening a new screen. This is a common design method for mobile apps, so you've probably seen it before, but here's a screenshot to help you visualize it:

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration platform for containers. Developed by Google, it offers an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Although most people run Kubernetes in a cloud environment, running a Kubernetes cluster locally is not only possible, it has at least two benefits:

Kubernetes has emerged as the standard orchestration engine for containers and containerized workloads. It provides a common, open source abstraction layer that spans public and private cloud environments.

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.