Do you have l33t ASCII/ANSI art skillz? Your work could grace the cover of Linux Journal! That's right—your ASCII art on the cover of the longest-running Linux publication on the planet. What the artwork is depicting is, really, up to you. But, since this is Linux Journal, here are a few good ideas:

Tighten up your code and identify errors before they occur with mypy. I've been using dynamic languages—Perl, Ruby and Python—for many years. I love the flexibility and expressiveness that such languages provide. For example, I can define a function that sums numbers:

  You've seen it a million times—the hash-bang (#!) line at the top of a script—whether it be Bash, Python, Perl or some other scripting language. And, I'm sure you know what its purpose is: it specifies the script interpreter that's used to execute the script. But, do you know how it actually works? Your initial thought might be that your shell (bash) reads that line and then executes the specified interpreter, but that's not at all how it works. How it actually works is the main focus of this post, but I also want to introduce how you can create your own version of "hash-bang" if you're so inclined.

On April 29, 2019, Canonical made headlines by officially announcing the availability of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure If you are unfamiliar with Canonical and the work that they do:

The printk() function is a subject of much ongoing consternation among kernel developers. Ostensibly, it's just an output routine for sending text to the console. But unlike a regular print routine, printk() has to be able to work even under extreme conditions, like when something horrible is going on and the system needs to utter a few last clues as it breathes its final breath.

What happens when you release 500,000 human genomes as open source? This. DNA is digital. The three billion chemical bases that make up the human genome encode data not in binary, but in a quaternary system, using four compounds—adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—to represent four genetic "digits": A, C, G and T. Although this came as something of a surprise in 1953, when Watson and Crick proposed an A–T and C–G pairing as a "copying mechanism for genetic material" in their famous double helix paper, it's hard to see how hereditary information could have been transmitted efficiently from generation to generation in any other way. As anyone who has made photocopies of photocopies is aware, analog systems are bad at loss-free transmission, unlike digital encodings. Evolution of progressively more complex structures over millions of years would have been much harder, perhaps impossible, had our genetic material been stored in a purely analog form.