"Integrate Open Source Culture and Code" entries
4 ways the Raspberry Pi is being used in education
Get inspired to create, teach, and learn with the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a small computer that can be used for a variety of projects, and has been heralded as a great boon to education due to its flexibility and simplicity. While PcPro magazine noted in January of 2014 that Pi’s were “gathering dust” in classrooms, production has not ceased. The usage map is pretty impressive and the Raspberry Pi 2 was recently released.
In February of this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that they’re starting a mentoring program for people 16-21 years old. Here are four other ways that the Pi is being used in education and growing the tech community.
Enterprising open source
Meg Blanchette interviews Continuum's Peter Wang about the growing role of OSS in the enterprise.
If you attend OSCON this year, you may notice a bit more attention paid to the enterprise side of tech. That is on purpose, as we have been noticing the open source and enterprise worlds edging closer and closer. Companies traditionally nervous about open source are either recognizing the inherent value, or their developers are using it and they don’t even realize. Open source is, in turn, seeing the benefits an established company can bring a project and the various opportunities available.
In that spirit, I spoke with Peter Wang, from Continuum Analytics. Continuum is a good example of this new hybrid — offering open source technology, while also having an enterprise side. Here, we discuss the changing landscape and what that can mean for people who embrace change, and for those who don’t.
Embracing Java for the Internet of Things
Technology executive and enthusiast Mike Milinkovich on Java's role in shaping future enterprise development.
Hardware and software are coming together in new and exciting ways. To get a better sense of this excitement, one need look no further than the nascent explosion of connected devices and technologies. But how do we best cater development for these emerging paradigms, and how do more mature languages, like Java, fit into the equation?
I spoke with Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation. Mike and his team are currently leading the charge to promote open source IoT protocols, runtimes, frameworks, and SDKs across a variety of languages, including Java. Eclipse’s IoT stack for Java is already being utilized by such companies as Philips, Samsung, and eQ-3. Here, he talks about Java’s unique standing in this emerging marketplace, and the impact of the open source community on IoT development.
5 reasons why Python is a popular teaching language
Python's simplicity makes it accessible to learners and teachers alike.
Download a free copy of Python in Education. Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from Python in Education, a free report written by Nicholas Tollervey.
I am going to answer a very simple question: which features of the Python language itself make it appropriate for education? This will involve learning a little Python and reading some code. But don’t worry if you’re not a coder! This chapter will hopefully open your eyes to how easy it is to learn Python (and thus, why it is such a popular choice as a teaching language).
Code readability
When I write a to-do list on a piece of paper, it looks something like this:
Shopping Fix broken gutter Mow the lawn
This is an obvious list of items. If I wanted to break down my to-do list a bit further, I might write something like this:
Shopping:
Eggs
Bacon
Tomatoes
Fix broken gutter:
Borrow ladder from next door
Find hammer and nails
Return ladder!
Mow the lawn:
Check lawn around pond for frogs
Check mower fuel level
Intuitively, we understand that the main tasks are broken down into sub-tasks that are indented underneath the main task to which they relate. This makes it easy to see, at a glance, how the tasks relate to each other.
Open source won, so what’s next?
What to expect at OSCON 2015.
Twenty years ago, open source was a cause. Ten years ago, it was the underdog. Today, it sits upon the Iron Throne ruling all it surveys. Software engineers now use open source frameworks, languages, and tools in almost all projects.
When I was putting together the program for OSCON with the other program chairs, it occurred to me that by covering “just” open source, we weren’t really leaving out all that much of the software landscape. It seems open source has indeed won, but let’s not gloat; let’s make things even better. Open source has made many great changes to software possible, but the spirit of the founding community goes well beyond code. Read more…
Software engineers must continuously learn and integrate
Four ways programmers can thrive in their careers.
As O’Reilly continues to build and assess our programming content ecosystem — now more than 30 years in the making — we have gone from covering a few key languages, operating systems, and concepts to a diversification of topics that would have made an editor’s head spin in the 1980s. Our goal, however, remains the same: to continue to provide practical content from experts who help you do your job. An important piece of that goal is to keep you informed as we interpret the trends on the horizon. What follows are a few of the core themes we are focusing on at the moment. Expect these to evolve and change with the speed of innovation.
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Actually be a software engineer
The term “full-stack” first emerged in a 2008 blog post (the original post is no longer available, but an archive is published here). The term perhaps reached its canonical definition in a post by Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno. He wrote:
“A ‘full-stack programmer’ is a generalist, someone who can create a non-trivial application by themselves. People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave.“
Whether you are striving to be a full-stack programmer, a T-shaped engineer, or you choose to rebuff those terms entirely as mere marketing, what now floats around as a “full-stack developer” definition is incomplete. Read more…