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One of the best outcomes of Ansible's move towards content collections is it spreads the thousands of modules in Ansible's "core" repository into many more independent repositories. This means movement on issues and modules that had long been delayed (often due to the sheer volume of issues and pull requests in the repo) can progress more rapidly.

In a previous article, I explored how Ansible can integrate with Google Calendar for change management, but I didn't get into the details of the Ansible module that was built for this purpose. In this article, I will cover the nuts and bolts of it.

I've been using Rust for a few months now, writing rather more of it than I expected—though quite a lot of that has been thrown away as I've learned, improved what I'm writing, and taken some more complex tasks beyond what I originally intended.

Have you ever considered your relationship with your manager? It's often the catalyst that defines both your work experience and job satisfaction, a relationship you want to take by the reins and lead, instead of sitting back and allowing its negative aspects to fester. The ultimate employee/manager relationship you should strive for is more of a partnership, one in which you and your manager work together to accomplish your mutual goals.

The developer relations job category is less than 10 years old, and the developer advocate role is even newer. In essence, developer advocates represent the voice of the user—in this case, that's usually the developer—internally to the company and the voice of the company externally to the community.

This year, I joined in on the Open Jam, a "game jam" in which programmers around the world dedicate a weekend to create open source games. The jam is essentially an excuse to spend a weekend coding, and the majority of the games that come out of the challenge are small distractions rather than something you're likely to play for hours on end. But they're fun, diverse, and open source, and that's a pretty good feature list for a game.

"If failure is not an option, then neither is success."—Seth Godin

Success is something we all strive toward, but the road to success has twists and turns, which are also known as our failures. But instead of giving up when things don't go my way, I have learned to look at failures as learning opportunities. In fact, I now proudly admit that I'm a failure:

If you have a website or run an online business, collecting data on where your visitors or customers come from, where they land on your site, and where they leave is vital. Why? That information can help you better target your products and services, and beef up the pages that are turning people away.

To gather that kind of information, you need a web analytics tool.

Is "anytime" a good time to execute your automation workflow? The answer is probably no, for different reasons.

If you want to avoid simultaneous changes to minimize the impact on critical business processes and reduce the risk of unintended service disruptions, then no one else should be attempting to make changes at the same time your automation is running.

In some scenarios, there could be an ongoing scheduled maintenance window. Or maybe there is a big event coming up, a critical business time, or a holiday—or maybe you prefer not to make changes on a Friday night.

System integrity is essential, especially when you're charged with safeguarding other people's personal details on your network. It's critical that system administrators are familiar with security tools, whether their purview is a home, a small business, or an organization with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Lately, I've been checking out pages on the nascent Gemini protocol, a new application-level protocol for hypertext documents. It falls somewhere between the minimalism of Gopher and the complexity and weight of the World Wide Web.

In the world of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and service-based architectures, it's not uncommon for companies to maintain dozens or even hundreds of APIs, often spanning multiple teams, programming languages, and environments. This variability makes it extremely difficult to see what's happening at a high level to prevent changes from having negative impacts.

A while ago, I published my wildly popular1 article How not to make a cup of tea. Casting around for something to write here, it occurred to me that I might write about something that I believe is almost as important as world peace, the forward march of progress, and brotherly/sisterly love: open source projects.

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.

If you've been on the internet for a very long time or you're just very resourceful, you might remember an early text-sharing protocol called Gopher. Gopher was eventually displaced by the HTTP protocol, which of course is the basis for the modern World Wide Web. For many people, the "internet" and the "World Wide Web" are the same thing, because many people don't consciously do anything online that's not on the www subdomain.

In the second article in this series, you created your first few video game scripts in Scratch. This article explores ways to expand programming's possibilities to create more advanced code.

There are multiple ways to introduce these skills to kids, such as:

Among the many additions in the recent Apache Cassandra 4.0 beta release, virtual tables is one that deserves some attention.

If you've ever shared a neat computer trick, a complex application, or something in between with a friend, then you've probably uttered the phrase, "Well, it works on my computer." No matter how advanced computers become, there seem to be recurrent problems related to the differences in what any two machines have configured or installed. There are ongoing attempts to solve this, and for Python developers, one of the best ways to prevent it is to use virtual environments.

Interrupts are an essential part of how modern CPUs work. For example, every time you press a key on the keyboard, the CPU is interrupted so that the PC can read user input from the keyboard. This happens so quickly that you don't notice any change or impairment in user experience.

The IBM POWER processor architecture is now over 30 years old. Although it arrived in February 1990 with a closed source operating system and closed source applications on top, it gradually embraced open source. I became a POWER user soon after it launched and an open source user and contributor just two years later.