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The Python Software Foundation (PSF) had to cancel its popular PyCon US event in response to COVID-19. I interviewed Ewa Jodlowska, Executive Director of the PSF, to talk about the experience and see what we all can learn, and how we can be supportive of the non-profit that supports one of my favorite programming languages.

I asked Jodlowska "how have you had to adjust your work in light of COVID-19?"

When I first got involved in community management, I was working at the Linux Foundation, involved in the relatively new Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project. Over the next few years, I started to notice a lot of companies building their business around open source software and talking about building communities around their products.

In times like these, it becomes all the more important to take a closer look at tools like Zoom, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.

Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool. Millions of developers and creators turn to it to collect and analyze their website statistics.

More than 53% of all sites on the web track their visitors using Google Analytics. 84% of sites that do use a known analytics script use Google Analytics.

Raspberry Pi can be used to interface with the real world from its GPIO, for example, by controlling a stepper motor. You can also use Raspberry Pi to dialog with some devices—like Arduino—by using a serial USB port.

In this guide, I'll show you how to connect your Raspberry Pi to a serial USB port and read its values with Python from the terminal (without a desktop environment). For this purpose, we'll use Pyserial and its terminal tool.

For science fiction fans, it feels like video chat was a long time coming, but now it's safe to say that a video call is indeed a great way to communicate remotely. Just as advertised by Star Trek and countless Philip K. Dick novels, the human face conveys a lot of information that the human voice doesn't. There's a human connection established through a video call that doesn't quite happen with text or even voice chats. It's a triumph of modern technology.

"There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't."

We work with binaries daily, yet we understand so little about them. By binaries, I mean the executable files that you run daily, right from your command line tools to full-fledged applications.

Linux provides a rich set of tools that makes analyzing binaries a breeze! Whatever might be your job role, if you are working on Linux, knowing the basics about these tools will help you understand your system better.

In this strange and difficult time of a global pandemic, we are all called upon to do things differently, to change our routines, and to learn new things.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

If you have a talent you want to share with the world, whether it's making your favorite sourdough bread or speedrunning through a level of your favorite video game, live streaming is the modern show-and-tell. It's a powerful way to tell the world about your hobby through a medium once reserved for exclusive and expensive TV studios. Not only is the medium available to anyone with a relatively good internet connection, but the most popular software to make it happen is open source.

Software development is messy. So many wrong turns, typos to fix, quick hacks and kludges to correct later, off-by-one errors you find late in the process. With version control, you have a pristine record of every wrong turn and correction made during the process of creating the "perfect" final product—a patch ready to submit upstream. Like the outtakes from movies, they are a little embarrassing and sometimes amusing.

WebP is an image format developed by Google in 2010 that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, web developers can create smaller, richer images that improve site speed. A faster loading website is critical to the user experience and for the website's marketing effectiveness.

For optimal loading across all devices and users, images on your site should not be larger than 500 KB in file size.

"I wanted to link to a particular Wikipedia article on my blog, but I found there wasn't one on that topic, so I wrote it myself," says Netha Hussain, 2020 Women in Open Source Academic Award winner. "That's the beauty of open source; anyone can contribute."

"Growing up, I was a bit of a field marshal," Megan Byrd-Sanicki, 2020 Women in Open Source Community Award winner, says with a smile. "I was always the one pulling classmates together. 'We're going to play a game. Come on, everyone, I'll teach you the rules.' I'd also have an eye to the sidelines, trying to identify who wasn't being included and how I could draw them in."

Computers are both my hobby and my profession. I have about 10 of them scattered around my apartment, all running Linux (including my Macs). Since I enjoy upgrading my computers and my computer skills, when I came across Bash it out by Sylvain Leroux, I jumped on the chance to buy it. I use the command line a lot on Debian Linux, and it seemed like a great opportunity to expand my Bash knowledge.

Mental resilience is the quality of being able to snap back after a setback, catastrophe, or anything bad that life throws at you. We all need resilience right now. For some of us, it's second nature, while others may be discovering or desiring to find that resilience because of the current COVID-19 crisis and the widespread stay-at-home orders.

Here are some tips for building your mental resilience and some great open source tools that can help.

The topic of DevOps vs. Agile is almost like debating iPhone vs. Android—everyone has an opinion, and emotions can become heated, especially if people disagree.

After writing DevOps v. Agile: What's the difference? and reading the comments on the article, I wanted to add some more thoughts—including how some of my thinking has changed on the topic.

At FOSS Backstage this year, I hosted a discussion on open source models and shared why I think subscriptions are a great way to support open source products.

The company I co-founded, Nextcloud, only offers its services to customers on a (per user) subscription model. Some customers ask us during the sales conversation why they cannot just get access to our engineers on an hourly basis as they get from third party consultants: pay for the bug fix or support case, and be done?

Traditionally, email services send data in an unprotected way—whether you are sending emails via SMTP or receiving them via IMAP or POP, the defaults are in cleartext. With more online applications enforcing encryption and the general consensus to protect your data, it's best to secure your email services with a Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) security certificate.

Already powering over 30% of the internet, WordPress is the fastest-growing content management system (CMS) in the world—and it's not hard to see why. With tons of customization available through coding and plugins, top-notch SEO, and a supreme reputation for blogging, WordPress has certainly earned its popularity.