September 2015 Summaries

The second annual Hacktoberfest is underway, a month-long celebration of open source software where participants are encouraged to make meaningful contributions to their favorite projects. This year, GitHub joins as a partner, and the minimum contribution requirement has been lowered from 50 commits to just four pull requests. To participate, individuals can sign up on the Hacktoberfest website and make four pull requests to any GitHub-hosted project, with a limited-edition T-shirt as a reward. The event also features sponsorships of developer events and a showcase of 31 awesome open source projects, inviting participants to check out, use, and contribute to them throughout the month.

DigitalOcean has launched its first Canadian datacenter in Toronto, marking a significant expansion of the company's presence in the country. The new datacenter, known as TOR1, offers highly requested features such as 40GbE networking and SSD storage, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to store their data in Canada. This move is part of DigitalOcean's commitment to providing high standards of privacy and security, and comes after a highly requested location was selected by the company. As a result, customers will now be able to take advantage of this new datacenter, which enables them to extend their existing protections and ensure that their data remains within Canada. To celebrate the launch, DigitalOcean will host events throughout October in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, providing opportunities for developers and businesses to connect and learn about the company's products.

Jay Gordon, a TechOps Engineer at DigitalOcean, shares his theory on the sysadmin mindset, emphasizing that fear of failure should not stop developers from using Linux. He encourages embracing failure as a means to learn and improve, rather than fearing it. To make failure "cheap" in terms of time and money, Jay proposes a development workflow involving on-demand snapshots, which can be achieved with responsive cloud hosting. This approach allows for quick failure/restoration cycles, enabling developers to meet low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets, while also reducing costs associated with hardware and personnel setup. By using tools to facilitate rapid iteration and recovery, Jay argues that fear can be replaced with confidence, leading to prosperity as a developer and sysadmin.