Open Source

“AWS Week in Review” goes open

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon AWS for over two years now. One thing that absolutely blows me away is how much activity there is in Amazon AWS development. Every day there is an announcement of a new services or updates to the existing ones. In order to help people keep up with all the updates, Jeff Barr of Amazon was blogging “AWS Week in Review” for a few years.

Now, imagine this – there is so much new stuff going on that it takes hours to prepare each of those blog posts:

Unfortunately, finding, saving, and filtering links, and then generating these posts grew to take a substantial amount of time. I reluctantly stopped writing new posts early this year after spending about 4 hours on the post for the week of April 25^th.

This is insane! So he almost gave up on the idea, as it is too time consuming. But people want it. What’s the solution? Go Open Source!

The AWS Week in Review is now a GitHub project (https://github.com/aws/aws-week-in-review). I am inviting contributors (AWS fans, users, bloggers, and partners) to contribute.

Every Monday morning I will review and accept pull requests for the previous week, aiming to publish the Week in Review by 10 AM PT. In order to keep the posts focused and highly valuable, I will approve pull requests only if they meet our guidelines for style and content.

At that time I will also create a file for the week to come, so that you can populate it as you discover new and relevant content.

I think that’s a brilliant move. Those weekly review posts are super useful for anyone involved with Amazon AWS. They should keep coming. But the time cost involved is understandable. So crowd-sourcing this is a smart way to go about it.

I hope this will not only continue the blog post series, but also take it to the new level, with more section, content, and insight.

Well done!

GitHub private repository contributions on your profile

GitHub blog says that from now on your profile can include the private repository contributions on your profile.

When enabled, these can make quite a difference in the number of the green boxes, showing your GitHub activity. Here’s an example from mine. Before enabling those, showing only Open Source contributions:

And here’s one after, including private repository contributions:

Indeed, it is a more accurate representation of my GitHub activity. Given that these days most of my private repository activity happens on BitBucket and not on GitHub, this is quite surprising.

Common files in PHP packages

Jordi Boggiano looks at some common files in PHP packages, using Packagist as a data source. There are some interesting metrics in there. For example:

58% of packages include a src/ directory and 5% a lib/ one. That’s surprisingly low to me, that means a lot have the code simply in the root folder.

4% have a bin/ directory, including some sort of CLI executables.

55% have a LICENSE file, that’s.. pretty disastrous but hopefully a lot of those that don’t at least indicate in the README and composer.json

49% have some file or directory indicating the presence of tests (phpunit.xml & co). I am not sure if this is good or bad news to be honest, that depends on your expectations.

Linux and open source have won

I knew this would happen for a long time. I knew it happened. But even if that’s nothing new, it’s still nice to hear – “Linux and open source have won, get over it“:

In 2015, Microsoft embraced Linux, Apple open-sourced its newest, hottest programming language, and the cloud couldn’t run without Linux and open-source software. So, why can’t people accept that Linux and open source have won the software wars?

This is a huge and import change in technology, which has major affect on the rest of the world. It’s nice to know that I’ve played a small part in that.

darktable 2.0 released

For those people who think Gimp is the only image editor on Linux, here’s darktable 2.0. I mentioned it briefly before, but never linked to it. Linux Weekly News has reviewed the release candidate recently. Have a look at the features page – it’s quite extensive. If you are more of a visual person, there here are a few screenshots.