There’s always at least one new thing I’ve never come across in every one of these kind of lists.

Cheeky title, but they’re talking about cheat, which is different than man and info in that it’s entirely example based and community maintained.

The cheat system cuts to the chase. You don’t have to piece together clues about how to use a command. You just follow the examples. Of course, for complex commands, it’s not a shortcut for a thorough study of the actual documentation, but for quick reference, it’s as fast as it gets.

All the details of the National Science Foundation’s “big bet” are in the article, but here’s the money quote:

If you are working on an open source project that might benefit from this kind of funding, check it out here. Phase I applications are due May 12, 2022, and Phase II applications are due October 21, 2022.

This diagram by Nived Velayudhan and Seth Kenlon might help you better understand Kubernetes by looking at the 10 steps that take place when you create a pod or a deployment.

Jim Hall used grep and some fancy regular expressions to get a leg up on Wordle, the word game that keeps you guessing… but only once per day. Some people may think of Jim’s technique as cheating. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.

But it’s a lot better than View Source-ing to get at the answer, which you can also do in a pinch. 😉

(Also there’s zero point to Wordle other than having fun, so it’s really only cheating if your answer-finding-method is less fun than you’d have otherwise. Even then, you’re only cheating yourself.)

When you start Vim with the --clean option, it shows up in “vanilla” mode. No plugins, no configuration, just back to the roots. I have collected a ton of configuration statements over the years, some of them dating from MS-DOS or Windows 3.1. Here is the deal: I will start from scratch to find a good starting-point configuration with just the plugins available in Fedora 35. Will I survive a week of coding? I’ll find out!

How Lukáš Zapletal dropped from 35 Vim plugins to just six.

Opensource.com asked the community to share about a time they sat down and wrote code that truly made them proud. Ten people responded with their experiences and learnings. Here’s an appetizer from Greg Scott:

One of mine around coding goes back to college in the 70s. I learned about parsing arithmetic expressions and putting them into Reverse Polish notation. And then, I figured out that, just like multiplication is repeated addition, division is repeated subtraction.

Alan Smithee on why Rust’s high performance, reliability, and productivity make it a good fit for embedded systems.

Luis Villa:

Here in 2021, it’s clear that a new set of standards for open source is coalescing. These bring new labor to be done, either by open source developers or as part of a metadata overlay. These new standards include:

• Security information and auditing…
• Legal metadata…
• Procurement information…

Somethings’ gotta give…

Don Watkins:

Mark Van Doren said, “the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” I saw that play out in this classroom using open source tools. More students need opportunities like this to help them gain a quality education. The Raspberry Pi 400 is a great form factor for teaching and learning.

Such a cool program that’d be easy to reproduce in your local library.

A solid primer on using openssl to encrypt all the things, which in this day and age is a skill that shoiuld be taught in secondary school right alongside how to bake a cake and change a tire.

Here is an example to help you understand the importance of cherry-picking. Suppose you have made several commits in a branch, but you realize it’s the wrong branch! What do you do now? Either you repeat all your changes in the correct branch and make a fresh commit, or you merge the branch into the correct branch. Wait, the former is too tedious, and you may not want to do the latter. So, is there a way? Yes, Git’s got you covered.

I’m a pretty big fan of cherry-pick, too. I don’t use it often, but every time I do… 👨‍🍳💋

We’ve linked to exa in the past, but this post may convince you to give it a try by detailing its many virtues.

I believe exa is one of the easiest, most adaptable tools. It helps me track a lot of Git and Maven files. Its color-coding makes it easier for me to search through multiple subdirectories, and it helps me to understand the current xattrs.

Seth Kenlon:

It turns out that Linux is an excellent platform for programmers, both new and experienced. It’s not that you need Linux to program. There are successful developers on all different kinds of platforms. However, Linux has much to offer developers. Here are a few things I’ve found useful.

I switched from Linux to OS X macOS 15 years(ish) ago and I hadn’t looked back until the last year or two. It might be getting time to give Linux another shot. But which distro to choose?🤔

Kevin Xu:

There are plenty of metrics you can track—stars, forks, pull requests (PRs), merge requests (MRs), contributor counts, etc.—but more data doesn’t necessarily mean clearer insights. I’ve previously shared my skepticism about the value of these surface-level metrics, especially when assessing an open source project’s health and sustainability.

In this article, I propose two second-order metrics to track, measure, and continually optimize to build a strong, self-sustaining open source community

Those two metrics? Breakdowns of code reviewers and leaderboards of different community interactions. (He also explains why. Worth a read.)

1️⃣ Value contributions to documentation just as much as code contributions
2️⃣ Put documentation and code in the same project repo
3️⃣ Make documentation a requirement for a merge or release milestone
4️⃣ Have a consistent contribution process for code and documentation
5️⃣ Have well-documented processes for contributing to documentation

That’s the TL;DR, but each of these is expanded upon in the article.

A nice primer on Nextcloud, which is worth a second look if you haven’t kicked the tires in a couple years.

I recently revisited Nextcloud and was amazed by all the changes I saw. The project has evolved into a complete solution that can replace big-name solutions like Google Drive and Microsoft 365. Nextcloud’s new feature set, especially Nextcloud Hub, is outstanding, offering collaborative documentation editing, file version control, integrated chat and video calling, and more.

Oh, and ICYMI our conversation with Nextcloud’s Frank Karlitschek ~> #383

Is it time to migrate away from cron?

Like cron jobs, systemd timers can trigger events—shell scripts and programs—at specified time intervals, such as once a day, on a specific day of the month (perhaps only if it is a Monday), or every 15 minutes during business hours from 8am to 6pm. Timers can also do some things that cron jobs cannot. For example, a timer can trigger a script or program to run a specific amount of time after an event such as boot, startup, completion of a previous task, or even the previous completion of the service unit called by the timer.

A smooth hand-off of your open source project is no easy feat. To help others succeed in this arena, Paul Götze build Adoptoposs.org:

I found that, on GitHub alone, there were more than 36,000 issues asking “Is this project abandoned?”, I thought about how to tackle this problem. More than 15,000 of these were open issues. So, lots of projects need help with their maintenance.

Members of the Opensource.com team stress-test five open source video-conferencing apps so you don’t have to.

The apps they tried are: Jitsi, Signal, P2p.chat, Nextcloud Talk, and BigBlueButton.

Jitsi looks pretty good. Anyone using it? What’s your experience?

An interview with Ewa Jodlowska on how the Python Software Foundation is responding to the cancelation of in-person events.

Turns out ~63% of the PSF’s 2020 revenue was projected to come from PyCon. That’s a massive hit to take. Read the entire interview to learn what they’re doing to diversify, some silver linings that have come from this, and how you can pitch in.

(The tail end of Adam’s conversation with Duane O’Brien focused on the FOSS Responders initiative which was purpose-built to help out orgs like the PSF.)

We’ve been logging a few of the ways the open source community has rallied to pitch in our skills around this global pandemic… now our friends at opensource.com created a round-up of their own.

I might be behind the curve on this one, because I didn’t even know YaCy (a p2p search engine) existed, let alone that you could hack/customize it! The concept immediately resonated with me:

One of the most exciting things about YaCy … is the fact that it’s a local client. Each user owns and operates a node in a globally distributed search engine infrastructure, which means each user is in full control of how they navigate and experience the World Wide Web.

Typosquatting is a way to lure users into divulging sensitive data to cybercriminals. Learn how to protect your organization, your open source project, and yourself.

I wish there were some better solutions to this particularly annoying threat, but this opensource.com piece is the best I’ve seen it covered.

After seeing what Gerhard pulled off with our v1 infrastructure, then talking to Dan Guido about Algo (episode coming this week), I’m more impressed by Ansible than ever. Here’s 10 high quality articles to impress you, compiled by the team at opensource.com.