opensource.com

Knowledge management is a key to success in modern enterprises—but it is not exactly easy to achieve. Keeping track of all relevant details across all employees is a huge challenge, especially in agile environments, which most companies say they are.

Containers and Kubernetes are awesome technologies that enable applications to run without a heavy operating system (OS), as using a virtual machine (VM) would require. Container-first, cloud-native applications are the future, but not every application is suitable to be cloud-native.

It's extremely common now to encounter code written in the Go programming language, especially if you are working with containers, Kubernetes, or a cloud ecosystem. Docker was one of the first projects to adopt Golang, Kubernetes followed, and many new projects select Go over other programming languages.

"Hello, I'm Miss Jess, and my students taught me how to code."

When I say this to new students, they often think I misspoke. But it's true. Coding always interested me, but it seemed inaccessible. Then my students taught me to code a video game during a few lunch breaks.

Their encouraging advice and suggestions helped me create my first video game using Scratch. The game was simple. It was about a monkey catching bananas as they fell from the sky. If you caught a ripe banana, you earned points.

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.

Chromebooks have been a game-changer for PreK-12 school systems, enabling them to purchase low-cost laptop computers for students, teachers, and administrators to use. While Chromebooks have always been powered by a Linux-based operating system (Chrome OS), until recently, there was no way to run most Linux apps on one.

Whether you're programming a game or an app with Python or Lua, you're probably using PNG graphics for your game assets. An advantage of the PNG format, which is not available in a JPEG, is the ability to store an alpha channel. Alpha is, essentially, the "color" of invisibility or transparency. Alpha is the part of an image you don't see.

Teaching kids to code is very popular in schools. Many years ago, in the days of the Apple II and Logo programming, I learned about turtle graphics. I enjoyed learning how to program the virtual turtle and later helping students to do the same.

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) was an avid mathematician with very wide interests. He is well-known for envisioning the idea of computers and single-handedly developed what he called a Difference Engine to make serial calculations. It was a mechanical machine with a series of axles and gears to make calculations, with the output being a printed table.

As I wrote in the first two articles in this series, I enjoy solving small problems by writing small programs in different languages, so I can compare the different ways they approach the solution. The example I'm using in this series is dividing bulk supplies into hampers of similar value to distribute to struggling neighbors in your community, which you can read about in the first article in this series.

Imagine these situations (women, minorities, and junior associates in organizations deal with them regularly, but they can happen to anyone):

Poet and activist Maya Angelou published many books throughout her storied career, but each time, she feared people would figure out that she'd "run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out." This seems an odd response from a well-honored writer. What she is describing is her own challenge with imposter syndrome.

This is part 12 in an ongoing series about creating video games in Python 3 using the Pygame module. Previous articles are:

Wekan is an open source kanban board application that allows you to manage your daily tasks with (virtual) cards. You can create boards and cards and move them between columns as you make progress on each task. You can also add people who work with you to the tasks on the board. Like other kanban tools, Wekan also allows you to use colored labels on cards to facilitate grouping, filtering, and assigning them to specific people. Because Wekan is open source (distributed under an MIT License), it's easy to modify and use.

In March 2020, rdiff-backup advanced to version 2, 11 years after the last major release. The deprecation of Python 2 at the beginning of 2020 was the impetus for this update, but it gave the development team the opportunity to incorporate other features and benefits.

The ability to access, connect, and manage multiple devices remotely through a single account is important. Going a step further, being able to completely update devices remotely is another way for sysadmins to reduce effort and minimize headaches.

The Raspberry Pi is a small, versatile device that makes interfacing with the real world a breeze for mere mortals. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's idea was to sell the devices at such a low cost that breaking one would be sad—but not a disaster. This is one reason it has been a massive success as an educational tool. But their usefulness has not escaped the business world, where they are becoming a valuable tool for automating the physical world.

Some things about the Ruby community have always impressed me. Two examples are the commitment to testing and the emphasis on making it easy to get started. The best example of both is Ruby Koans, where you learn Ruby by fixing tests.

Part of the system administrator's job is to analyze the performance of systems and to find and resolve problems that cause poor performance and long startup times. Sysadmins also need to check other aspects of systemd configuration and usage.

Python has incredibly scalable options for exploring data. With Pandas or Dask, you can scale Jupyter up to big data. But what about small data? Personal data? Private data?

JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook provide a great environment to scrutinize my laptop-based life.