This week I am talking to Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering. He is behind the Talos II and Blackbird boards for IBM POWER9 CPUs. His major claim is creating the first fully owner controlled general purpose computer in a long while. My view of the Talos II and Blackbird systems is that these boards helped to revitalize the open source ecosystem around POWER more than any other efforts (See also: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/cult-amiga-sgi-workstations-matter/). Most open source developers I talked to say that coding on a remote server is just work. Doing the same on your local workstation adds an important ingredient: passion. This is why the re-introduction of POWER workstations was a very important step: developers started to improve support for POWER also in their free time, not just in their regular working hours. I asked Tim how the idea of creating their POWER board was born, how Covid affected them and also a bit about their future plans.

The challenges of the past few years have prompted many leaders to take a fresh look at their emotional intelligence (EQ) skills. It’s an area that’s worth focusing on, especially for those who want to advance their career by offering qualities that go beyond technical skills.

Here are my top picks for readers looking to improve their EQ. While some of these were published years ago, they still hold relevance today.

Some principles of software development – also known as programming – don’t ever really change.

Programming is problem-solving. Programming is communication, albeit with a machine. Programming is what makes that machine – and millions of others – usable to the masses. Programming is imperfect, always a work in progress. Programming is work.

Preface the longstanding term with the word “modern,” however – as in, modern programming or modern software development – and you are in fact saying that things have changed. It might suggest there could be pre-modern and even ancient phases of software development, as if we’re talking about art history instead of computers and software.

The term “modern software development,” in particular, gets thrown around with semi-regularity. It’s indeed used to convey that the speaker (or writer) is referring to software that is being built and operated today as opposed to at some unspecified point in the past. While some core principles might not waver, much of today’s software is being built differently – and more quickly – than in the past.

Kubernetes is the de facto standard when it comes to container orchestration and management at scale, but adoption is only one piece of Kubernetes strategy. Security plays a huge role in how organizations use cloud-native technologies, and is typically much trickier to address than simply spinning up and running containers. Red Hat’s The State of Kubernetes Security for 2022 examines the security challenges organizations face when it comes to cloud-native development and how they address these challenges to protect their applications and IT environments.

Red Hat is excited to announce that Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes is now available as an open source project: StackRox. Kubernetes users and developers can join the community and test and contribute to the codebase of the project on GitHub.

Kubernetes is at the foundation of cloud-native development and one of the fastest growing open source projects. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) 2021 survey, 96% of respondents reported that they are using or evaluating Kubernetes. The open sourcing of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security gives organizations a way to help shape the future of how they can better manage and protect their Kubernetes environments.

It’s been nearly a full year since we relaunched Kube by Example, the free online training portal for technical professionals looking to learn more about Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies. Since then, Kube by Example has continued to grow in many ways.

Konveyor is a community of people passionate about helping others modernize and migrate their applications to the hybrid cloud by building tools, identifying patterns, and providing advice on how to break down monoliths, adopt containers, and embrace Kubernetes. To do so, the Konveyor community is currently working on five projects to help users rehost, replatform, and refactor their applications to Kubernetes.

Cryostat manages the monitoring of Java applications using Java Flight Recorder (JFR) in the cloud. Cryostat 2.1 includes support for GraphQL to control flight recordings on multiple applications, containers, and Kubernetes pods, with powerful filtering capacities. This article discusses the motivation for adding GraphQL support, shares some examples of queries along with expected results, and takes a look at the underlying web requests on the GraphQL endpoint.

The partnership announced last week will see Red Hat working with General Motors to bring connected vehicles to a new level.