Kubernetes Dominates in IT Job Searches

Kubernetes was the dominant technology skill requested by IT firms in 2018, according to a new report from jobs board Dice.

The report, which scoured the site’s job postings, found that “Kubernetes” was far and away the skill most requested by IT recruiters and hiring managers. Nate Swanner, editor of Dice Insights, noted that Kubernetes – and to a lesser extent Terraform – led the demand of skill requests toward “containerization of apps and services, as well as the cloud.” Terraform is an infrastructure as code software by HashiCorp.

“The popularity of these two skills suggests that companies are continuing to invest in designing their own scalable stacks that use cloud services such as [Amazon Web Services] or Azure for storage and compute,” Swanner wrote.

Linaro announces appointment of new CEO Li Gong

Li Gong joins Linaro following more than two decades of senior leadership and technical roles at companies including Sun, Microsoft, and Mozilla. In addition to having more than 20 US patents, three books, and numerous technical papers, Li Gong has been involved in open source technologies and collaborative engineering for over twenty years, including his significant contribution and leadership roles for the Java platform and for Firefox/Firefox OS.

Ansible Bender in OKD #2

Setting up a Minimalistic Ubuntu Installation

Improvements to apt-file since stretch

The list of changes for apt-file in buster is rather short, but I would still like to mention a few of them in this post.

Spotify Tops Ubuntu's Snap Store Downloads While GIMP Tops Flatpak's Flathub

At the end of 2018, Canonical's Alan Pope shared the most popular Snap packages for 2018. Now there's a similar list out of the folks maintaining Flathub for Flatpak packages. The list of popular applications is quite different between these app sandboxing/distribution means.

Redis in-memory storage

Redis (Remote directory server) [1] is an open source, in-memory data structure store that can be used as a database, cache, and message broker. It supports a wide range of data structures, such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, bitmaps, HyperLogLogs, and geospatial indexes. Redis servers can be loaded locally, or they are available as web-hosted solutions. Redis libraries are available for a wide variety of programming languages.

Joomla 4.0 on the Horizon, More Open Source News

The Joomla project has announced the availability of Joomla 4.0 Alpha 6 for testing purposes only. The announcement represents another big step toward the imminent release of Joomla 4.0.

The primary objectives of this Alpha release are to provide developers with a basis to test their custom extensions and report any bugs and issues before the publication of the final release, and to become familiar with the new features that will be introduced in Joomla 4.0.

Opening government data, new life for Mozilla Labs, a bug bounty program, and more news

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look making government data open in the U.S., German state funding an open source e-health app, the return of Mozilla Labs, and more

The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls

SCIENCE IS BUILT, enhanced, and developed through the open and structured sharing of knowledge. Yet some publishers charge so much for subscriptions to their academic journals that even the libraries of the world’s wealthiest universities such as Harvard are no longer able to afford the prices. Those publishers’ profit margins rival those of the most profitable companies in the world, even though research is largely underwritten by governments, and the publishers don’t pay authors and researchers or the peer reviewers who evaluate those works. How is such an absurd structure able to sustain itself—and how might we change it?

When the World Wide Web emerged in the ’90s, people began predicting a new, more robust era of scholarship based on access to knowledge for all. The internet, which started as a research network, now had an easy-to-use interface and a protocol to connect all of published knowledge, making each citation just a click away … in theory.

Instead, academic publishers started to consolidate. They solidified their grip on the rights to prestigious journals, allowing them to charge for access and exclude the majority of the world from reading research publications—all while extracting billions in dollars of subscription fees from university libraries and corporations. This meant that some publishers, such as Elsevier, the science, technology, and medicine-focused branch of the RELX Group publishing conglomerate, are able today to extract huge margins—36.7 percent in 2017 in Elsevier’s case, more profitable than Apple, Google/Alphabet, or Microsoft that same year.

Presenting the PLOS ONE Open Quantum Computation and Simulation collection

We are pleased to present the first papers of the PLOS ONE collection on Open Quantum Computation and Simulation to the public. Quantum information and technologies have experienced an enormous boost in the last couple of years moving from a purely academic environment to new realms in advanced research centers, startups and corporate companies. This transition requires new methodologies and approaches to fruitfully achieve the challenging goals set out by this research program.

The Solderdoodle Open Source Iron Rides Again

Now, [Isaac] is back with an updated version he calls the Solderdoodle Plus. It’s still based on the heating element from the Weller BP645, but now boasts twice the power, an improved 3D printed case, an intuitive touch-based user interface, and even some LED blinkenlights for good measure. As with the original Solderdoodle the hardware and software for the device are open source and you’re invited to build your own, though kits are also available through an already fully-funded Kickstarter campaign.

[Isaac] says that the temperature control functions on traditional corded soldering irons waste energy due to the large thermal mass they have to bring up to temperature. But with less thermal mass and a system of variable duty cycle pulsed power, he says the Solderdoodle Plus can do the same work as an old-school 60 watt iron while only consuming 10 watts. This allows the iron to maintain a constant 500°C for over an hour on the dual internal Panasonic NCR18500A lithium-ion batteries, and means you can charge it up with nothing more exotic than a micro USB cable.

How Trulia began paying down its technical debt

As every software company knows, over time as code ages and workarounds build on work-arounds, the code base becomes bloated. It becomes ever more difficult to get around the technical debt that you’ve built up over time. It’s really impossible to avoid this phenomenon, but at some point, companies realize that the debt is so great that it’s limiting their ability to build new functionality. That’s precisely what Trulia faced in 2017 when it began a process of paying down that debt and modernizing its architecture.

Trulia is a real estate site founded way back in 2005, an eternity ago in terms of technology. The company went public in 2012 and was acquired by Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, but has continued to operate as an independent brand under the Zillow umbrella. It understood that a lot had changed technologically in the 12 years since its inception when engineering began thinking about this. The team knew it had a humongous, monolithic code base that was inhibiting the ability to update the site.