Set Better Career Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide

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October 31, 2018

In my previous article, I explained the benefits of setting your professional goals in the open—collaboratively and transparently, so others could enrich the process. And earlier in the year, I provided my perspective on performing your professional self-assessments the same way. Now I’d like to offer my preferred process for making all this work.

Whatever goal setting methodology you choose (be it SMART, OKRs, or something else), approach the process as its own project in a transparent and collaborative way. In other words, treat the goal setting process as its own project, just like you would the work toward the goals themselves.

Start with where you are

Before stating your wild goals for the future, first build an understanding of where you are now. This way you’ll be able to chart a clear path from here to your ideal future state—that is, once you’ve identified your goals.

Ubuntu Fan Aims to Simplify Container Networking

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Enterprise Networking Planet

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October 31, 2018

Most people will think of Ubuntu as primarily a Linux server and cloud technology effort. Ubuntu also has some networking capabilities that it develops on its own including the Fan container networking project.

There are multiple open source SDN efforts in the market today that more well known than Fan, including the Tungsten Fabric and OVN, among others. Fan however, takes a different approach than other SDN models.

“Fan is a zero configuration SDN,” Mark Shuttleworth CEO of Canonical Inc and Founder of Ubuntu, said. “What you trade is the ability to live migrate an IP address for simplicity.”

39 No Frills Keyboard Shortcuts Every Developer Should Follow

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Dev.to

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October 31, 2018

What used to be 27 is now 39 – Due to all the great comments, I’ve amended the list to add a few more suggestions, thanks to all that contributed.

Shortcuts are the most productive thing that a developer can add to their repertoire that will aid them through their entire career. Learning how to use your system and tools will improve your productivity and in general make traversing all your windows and apps a breeze. The mouse is a great, tool, but if you can do it quicker, more effectively without your hands leaving your keyboard then you should!

Here’s a list of my most used shortcuts, you’ll probably know or use quite a few of these already, hopefully there is one here you don’t!

55 Percent of Cloud Developers Contribute to Open Source, Says Survey

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Eric Brown

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October 30, 2018

In presenting the results of its survey of 4,300 cloud developers, DigitalOcean seemed surprised that only 55 percent of respondents contribute to open source projects. Yet to tech outsiders — or old-timers — it may be more surprising that more than half of developers do contribute. There are relatively few professions in which companies and their employers regularly offer pro bono services for the greater good of the industry.

DigitalOcean, which provides cloud infrastructure software and services, has timed its “Currents” survey release in conjunction with the conclusion of its fifth annual Hacktoberfest program. Co-hosted with GitHub and twilio, Hacktoberfest invites developers to collaborate during the month of October on a smorgasbord of open source projects.

Corporate leaders appear to be sending mixed messages to their developers about open source. Although 71 percent of respondents to the DigitalOcean survey said that their employers “expect them to use open source software as part of their day-to-day development work,” employers are less supportive of their developers contributing to software that doesn’t directly benefit the company. Only 34 percent of respondents said they were given time to work on open source projects not related to work.

Younger developers more willing to contribute

The report reveals some encouraging signs, as well. Some 37 percent of the developers said they would contribute more to open source if their companies gave them the time to do so. In addition, despite some 44 percent of respondents saying they don’t contribute because they feel they lack the right skills and 45 percent saying they don’t know how to get started, the less experienced, and presumably younger, developers appear more open to contributing. A total of 60 percent of developers with five or fewer years of experience contribute to open source, while the number is “significantly less” for developers with more experience, says DigitalOcean. This bodes well for future contribution levels.

Developers in India were more likely to contribute to open source projects (68 percent) than any other nationality. Although DigitalOcean did not speculate, this may be due in part to the younger average age of Indian developers.

Motivations to contribute include the opportunity to improve coding skills, learn new technologies, and advance one’s career. Also noted was the less tangible benefit of being part of a community.

Among the many other findings in the survey, the leading programming language for open source projects was JavaScript (62 percent) followed by Python at 52 percent. The only other languages over 20 percent were PHP (29 percent), Java (28 percent), and CSS (25 percent). When asked which open source projects have “excited you the most” over the last three years, the React.js JavaScript library for building UIs took the top spot with 468 mentions, followed by Kubernetes (335), Docker (252), Linux (240), and Tensorflow (226).

Companies are failing to lead the open source charge by example. Only 18 percent of employees said their companies actively participated in open source organizations such as the listed examples: Apache Foundation, Node.js Foundation, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Three out of four respondents said their companies have donated $1,000 or less to such organizations over the last year.

Not surprisingly, high cost was the leading reason (38 percent) why companies skimp on open source donations and labor contributions. This was followed by a preference for in-house development (33 percent) and lack of knowledge of the listed organizations (27 percent). More promisingly, 29 percent said their companies plan to contribute to such organizations in the future.

When asked which of the five leading tech companies were doing the most to support open source, 53 percent listed Google, and Microsoft came in second at 23 percent. Next came Facebook (10%), Amazon (4%), and Apple (1%). Although IBM does not appear on this list, its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat this weekend — the second largest software acquisition in history — should boost its already extensive open source contributions in cloud software.

For more survey results, check out ActiveState’s survey of 1,407 open source developers, which focuses on open source runtimes, and the open source programs survey from The New Stack and The Linux Foundation, which looks at the role of open source programs within organizations.

IBM’s Call for Code Prize Goes to a Team with ‘Clusterducks’

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Wired

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October 30, 2018

It’s an intractable problem during natural disasters: telecommunications networks and power grids are often damaged or overwhelmed; without them, first responders struggle to help survivors, coordinate evacuations, and even count the dead. Project Owl proposes an elegant solution: an AI-powered disaster coordination platform paired with a robust communication network that can reach people even when other connections are down. … The “clusterduck” is a buoy with internet-of-things-type low-frequency connectivity that could form an ad-hoc communication network in areas hit hard by natural disaster.

Now Project Owl has won IBM’s first ever Call for Code contest, which challenged developers across the world to build disaster relief technology using IBM and open-source software. More than 100,000 developers from 156 countries participated in the contest. A panel of judges including former President Bill Clinton selected Project Owl from a field of five finalists whose solutions ranged from using AI to speed up the rebuilding process after an earthquake to feeding firefighters live data during wildfires via sensors.

In fact, the top 10 finalists will all have their projects officially sanctioned by the Linux Foundation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Launches with Improved Security

By

eWeek

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October 30, 2018

A day after announcing a $34 billion deal with IBM, it’s business as usual at Linux vendor Red Hat.

Red Hat announced the general availability of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.6 release on Oct. 30, providing organizations with improved security, management and container features. Among the enhanced features is support for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 specification for security authentication.

“TPM 2.0 support has been added incrementally over recent releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, as the technology has matured,” Steve Almy, principal product manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat, told eWEEK. “The TPM 2.0 integration in 7.6 provides an additional level of security by tying the hands-off decryption to server hardware in addition to the network bound disk encryption (NBDE) capability, which operates across the hybrid cloud footprint from on-premise servers to public cloud deployments.”

Trouble Finding Qualified Techies? Retrain the Ones You’ve Got

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HPE Blog

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October 30, 2018

IT hiring managers struggling to fill skill gaps may be overlooking a natural source of talent: their existing employees who can be strategically trained in hard-to-find skill sets.

As the complexity of in-demand technical skills increases, the size of the available applicant pool shrinks considerably. According to an exclusive survey on the IT workforce and hiring trends conducted by IDG and HPE in June, 28 percent of the 101 respondents have a harder time filling available positions now than they did three years ago. The reduced size of the IT applicant pool is especially problematic for larger enterprises (those with 10,000-plus employees), cited by 35 percent of the survey respondents. …

Tuition assistance, internal training, and focus on key growth initiatives are some of the more popular ways survey respondents empower existing IT employees. For one participant, reskilling employees does more than help address key skills gaps. It also goes a long way in attracting and retaining top talent. In the process, it differentiates the company’s IT workplace from those of its competitors. “We focus on internal mobility, mentorship programs, and reimbursement for certifications,” says the IT director who works at a Fortune 100 company.

Raspberry Pi: Hands-on with Kali, openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu MATE Linux

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ZDNet

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October 30, 2018

It has been nearly two years since I tried Fedora, Manjaro and Ubuntu MATE on the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3, and there have been a lot of changes since then. Most for the better, such as the introduction of the Pi 3B+, but a few for the worse, such as the end of the Manjaro Pi development. So I think it’s time to take a fresh look at this.

So, I have taken what I consider to be the four best-known or most popular Linux distributions which have Raspberry Pi ports available, and tried them out on a few of my Raspberry Pi systems. One thing that I am doing differently this time is that I have limited my testing to the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 (including the 3B+). I learned the last time that even if you could get something running on a Pi Zero or 1, the performance was just too bad to be worthwhile.

Learn to Work with the Linux Command Line

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Sam Dean

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October 29, 2018

Open source software isn’t just proliferating within technology infrastructures around the world, it is also creating profound opportunities for people with relevant skills. Organizations of all sizes have reported widening skills gaps in this area. Linux tops the list as the most in-demand open source skill, according to the 2018 Open Source Jobs Report. With this in mind, In this article series, we are taking a closer look at one of the best new ways to gain open source and Linux fluency: the Introduction to Open Source Software Development, Git and Linux training course from The Linux Foundation.

This story is the third in a four-part article series that highlights major aspects of the training course. The first article in the series covered the course’s general introduction to working with open source software, with a focus on such essentials as project collaboration, licensing, legal issues and getting help. The second article covered the course curriculum dedicated to working with Bash and Linux basics.

Working with commands and command-line tools are essential Linux skills, and the course delves into task- and labs-based instruction on these topics. The discussion of major command-line tools is comprehensive and includes lessons on:

Tools for creating, removing and renaming files and directories

Locating files with find and locate
Finding character strings in files using grep
Substituting strings in files using sed

There is a Labs module that asks you to set the prompt to a current directory and encourages follow up by changing the prompt to any other desired configuration. In addition to being self-paced, the course focuses on performing meaningful tasks rather than simply reading or watching.

Overall, the course contains 43 hands-on lab exercises that will allow you to practice your skills, along with a similar number of quizzes to check your knowledge. It also provides more than 20 videos showing you how to accomplish important tasks.

As you go through these lessons, keep in mind that the online course includes many summary slides, useful lists, graphics, and other resources that can be referenced later. It’s definitely worth setting up a desktop folder and regularly saving screenshots of especially useful topics to a folder for handy reference. For example, here is a slide that summarizes the handy utilities that any user should have in his or her toolbox:

With the groundwork laid for working with the command line and command line tools, the course then comprehensively covers working with Git, including hands-on learning modules. We will explore the course’s approach to this important topic in the next installment in this series.

Learn more about Introduction to Open Source Development, Git, and Linux (LFD201) and sign up now to start your open source journey.

What Operations Professionals Need to Know to Fuel Career Advancement

By

O'Reilly

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October 29, 2018

O’Reilly conducted a recent survey [1] of operations professionals, and the results offer useful information and insights to empower your career planning.

Scripting languages are the most popular programming languages among respondents, with Bash being the most used (66% of respondents), followed by Python (63%), and JavaScript (42%).

Go is used by 20% of respondents, and those who use Go tend to have one of the higher median salaries at $102,000, similar to LISP and Swift. This could be related to the types of companies that are pushing these programming languages. Google and Apple, for example, are very large companies and, as noted, salary and company size are related.

And what about the operating system in which respondents work? Linux tops the charts at 87% usage. Windows is also used frequently (63%), often as a mix between workstations and servers, and in some cases as a front end for Linux/Unix servers.