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The email that you use with your open source commits isn’t just perfunctory—it can communicate intent and important context

There’s so much more to open source than what fits into a license.

There’s so much more to open source than what fits into a license.

Hopefully you’ve identified rituals for your “commute” and have set up your space in a way that’s conducive to work. But how do you go from turning around and asking your colleague a question to communicating and collaborating in a much more…intentional way? The virtual “turn around” (🎶bright eyes🎶) If you work on a team that’s used to being largely in person together (or in clusters), working from home is going to hit you pretty hard....

With so many people suddenly working remotely, I thought I’d share some tips that I’ve learned over the years as I’ve worked from home. As many are discovering, it’s not just a matter of opening up your laptop on your couch and getting to work. There are lots of distractions and differences – some subtle, some not – when working from home. Getting ready and winding down If you’ve been working from an office primarily, you probably have a commute....

It’s pretty common knowledge now that you can set image descriptions on Twitter, but did you know that you can set them on your Instagram posts too? Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it. Let’s say I want to share a photo of my dog, Luna. The first steps are the same as the usual Instagram process: I select a photo, apply a filter, and write a description. That takes me here:...

Descriptions on images, also known as alt-text, are important for people reading your content using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Screen readers synthesize on-screen text, which allows people who are blind or have low vision to interact with technology. However, images cannot be “read out loud” the same way that text can, so screen readers rely on the person posting the image to set the description via alt-text, and synthesize that property instead....

All Things Open is a conference dedicated to open source tech and practices. Although ostensibly focused on tech in the enterprise, many of the talks applied to non-enterprise audiences as well. It’s a multi-multi-multi-track conference, with 4000+ attendees, held in Raleigh, NC. I hadn’t attended before, and since I live so close now, I decided to go! I’m all for the hallway track, but I was determined to make it to at least some sessions each day....

2-Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) are ways of securing accounts above and beyond normal password protection. Typically, we think of 2FA as something you know (your password) and something you have (a device). The idea is that if you compromise one, you still can’t get access to the protected resource. A room protected by a keypad and ID card reader is a great example of 2FA. You might be able to guess the code, but you’d also need a valid ID card to get access to the locked room....

I’ve been working on a library that includes some vector manipulations in Go, trying to follow good development practices and starting with writing my tests first. But early on, I ran into a bit of a problem: floating points. The problem Now, we know that floating points are an issue in programming, by the very nature of how they’re represented in memory. I loved Julia Evans’s brief explanation of how floats work in her Linux Comics Zine (scroll down to the sixth panel), and for a more in-depth explanation, see this piece by Carl Burch....