Writing
Articles
137 articles, newest first.
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The Apache Software Foundation: Celebrating 25 Years of Innovation
It started with a few webmasters swapping patches for an abandoned web server. Twenty-five years later the Apache Software Foundation hosts more than 300 projects that quietly run the world's data, and has a governance…
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What is OpenStack and How Does it Compare to VMware vSphere?
OpenStack and vSphere get compared constantly, and the comparison usually misses that they're different kinds of thing. vSphere runs virtual machines very well. OpenStack builds a cloud. What each one is, who should run…
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Why Being Platform Agnostic is Crucial for Linux Systems Engineers
The most useful Linux engineers can also find their way around Active Directory, a Mac, a Cisco switch and a mainframe console. Why knowing the other platforms makes you better at Linux, which ones matter most in 2024…
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The Evolution of Semiconductor Giants
Eight engineers walked out on William Shockley in 1957, and almost every chip company that matters descends from that walk-out or from a man who spent 25 years at Texas Instruments. How Fairchild, TI, Intel, AMD and…
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Understanding Foobar, Foo, Bar, Baz, Qux, and Quux in Programming and Linux
Every programmer learns foo and bar before they learn what they mean. Where the words came from (a 1930s comic strip, Second World War slang and an MIT model railroad club), what comes after quux, what other countries…
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Choosing the Right Cloud Service Provider
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Linode, now part of Akamai, are all good, and the brochures all say the same things. How they actually differ in mid-2024, the costs that don't appear on the pricing page, this year's quiet…
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The Sci-Fi Vision for AI
Science fiction has been writing about thinking machines for a century, and in 2024 the stories and the headlines have started to overlap. Where the fiction came from, what the real history looks like next to it, which…
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Enterprise Linux Engineer Essentials
The skills that separate a Linux engineer an enterprise trusts with production from someone who has memorized commands. The fundamentals that never go out of date, the modern stack on top of them, and the habits nobody…
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Creative Applications on Linux
You can do serious graphic design, video and music work on Linux in 2024, and plenty of professionals do. The tools that are genuinely good, the ones that are good but different, the gaps that are still real, and why…
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OPINION: Why I Prefer Debian
Debian is my default for almost everything. Not because it's exciting, but because it's boring in all the right ways, and because nobody can sell it. The reasons, the trade-offs I accept, and where I'd pick something…
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Introduction to OpenTofu: A New Era of Cloud Infrastructure Management
OpenTofu is Terraform as it was before HashiCorp changed the license, kept open by the Linux Foundation and now shipping features Terraform doesn't have. Where it came from, what it does, how to move to it, and why IBM…
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Mitigating Ransomware Attacks on Linux
Ransomware gangs stopped ignoring Linux once they realized that encrypting one hypervisor takes out every virtual machine on it. How attacks on Linux actually happen, and the defenses that matter, starting with backups…