Top 5 articles of the week: Developers' golden age

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Top 5 articles of the week on Opensource.com

By Urbanzenvia Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 / Modified by Jen Wike Huger

Every week, I tally the numbers and listen to the buzz to bring you the best of last week's open source news and stories on Opensource.com, this week: November 3 - 7, 2014.

Top 5 articles of the week

5. Eskimo conserves resources with igloo applications

Clevertech CEO Sergey Pascan and lead Node.js senior developer at Clevertech Nick Baugh bring us the story of their boilerplate framework, Eskimo. Fans of The Lean Startup metholodgy, they built Eskimo to be a Minimal Viable Product. The idea being that you build a version of a new product that allows your team to "collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." You can see this method in one of the pillars of the open source way: rapid prototyping. Eskimo is then used to build applications, or what they are calling "igloos." Nick and Sergey give readers an understanding of how they made their open source project, why they made it, and some of the products that have come out of it's use.

4. Health Hack 2014: the power of open source, open data, and cross-disciplinary collaboration

Hackathons, which are all-day and sometimes all-night work sessions on a particular problem or project, are commonplace among open source communities and techies in general. Some groups code, some code and document, some code and document and design and write and more! Tim Hildred shares one such hackathon with us called Health Hack 2014, organized in Melbourne, Austrailia to work on problems in medical research. 21 hours in and teams had formed around ideas. Finally, 48 hours since it all began, winning teams and projects of resources like the grand prize 10,000 compute hours on Trefid, Australia’s premier supercomputer were announced.

3. Tutorial to create a vector graphic with Inkscape

Kimberly Keyes how-to guide for drawing using open source tool Inkscape was a big hit with readers who want to learn more about creating vectors from photographs instead of drawing them freehand. Her subjects for this tutorial are two fluffy dogs named Boo and Buddy. And Kim shares some of her other works using this process with Inkscape, including the famous Grumpy Cat® who you can see at the top of this article. A bonus for readers is Kim's explanation of which photographs by others you are allowed to use from the Internet. All of Kim's images are licensed under Creative Commons and available on OpenClipArt.org.

2. An open source ERP system built to self-implement

This story of building an open source ERP system—that is, Enterprise Resource Planning, that a company can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities—is the kind of story Opensource.com readers get a lot of. True tales of what it's like to work on open source projects, and what the outcomes can be, so that you can learn more about the people who build the tools you love. And hey, maybe you'll be inspired to contribute or build your own one day.

1. If you write code, this is your golden age

Remy Decausemaker attended Jeffrey Hammond's opening keynote at the All Things Open conference this year and gives readers a close-to-complete—but for accuracy's sake we'll call it a "partial"—transcription of his talk. Jeffrey presented a thoughtful and provoking opening keynote that drove right at the heart of how the tech landscape is changing, pointing out with clear statistics that this is a golden age for developers.

Here's an exerpt from Remy's transcription, but check out the full article for more stats:

"We are in a generational tech shift. Modern tech is different than client/server applications. We gotta understand how to use this tech, and elastic architectures that allow us to innovate cheaply. The cheapness of open source is a perfect fit for modern platforms. 4 out of 5 use open source, and it works. Open source software projects drive the collaborative collectives, whether they hang on GitHub, or in Drupal, or in foundations like Eclipse or Apache. These are the centers of gravity of development moving forward into the next decade, and the center of gravity grows. Talent is a seller's market, and we are in a golden age."

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Jen leads a team of community managers for the Digital Communities team at Red Hat. She lives in Raleigh with her husband and daughters, June and Jewel.

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