Is It a Best/Recommended Practice to Use Branching with Version Control Systems?

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Problem scenario
You are debating on using branching with your repositories or using trunk-based development (with virtually no other branches). Is it a best practice to develop on the mainline (with branching infrequently if ever)?

Solution
Maybe. It is not clear.

In Support of the “Yes” / You Should Use Branches
In practice many companies use Git Flow or other branches in their Git repositories.

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What Does the Number “2” in a man Command Mean?

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Question
Normally when you use the man page, you just type man nameofcommand. But you have seen integer numbers between 1 and 9 (inclusive) between the “man” and the command’s name. What do those numbers signify?

Answer
This legend was taken from “man man” on a Linux server:

1 Executable programs or shell commands
2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3 Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), …

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What Happens Technically when Someone Opens a Web Browser and Goes to a Website?

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Question
Surfing the World Wide Web happens as a part of everyday life. In a job interview, you are asked to describe what happens behind the scenes when you open a web browser and enter a URL. The hiring manager wants to hear your knowledge of assembling packets of PHP, JavaScript, HTML, networking, or other technologies involved and how the sequence proceeds. What are the details of what happens behind-the-scenes?

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Technical Books by Category

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If you resolve to learn more about technologies, you may want to buy technical books.  Here are lists of books on many different I.T. subjects:

Apache Spark
Apache Tomcat
Apache Web Server
AWS
Azure
Bitcoin
Bioinformatics
C#
CFengine
Chef
Docker
E-Discovery
Elastic Stack
Flask
Forensics (Computer Forensics)
Git
Hadoop
Kubernetes
Informatica
Message Queueing Technologies (excluding RabbitMQ)
RabbitMQ
Redis
REST API
Security
Site Reliability Engineering
PowerShell
Puppet
Python
SalesForce
SAP
Squid
SSL and TLS
Terraform
VMware
vSphere
Windows

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What Does AI Stand For in addrinfo?

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Problem scenario
You see several variables that start with “ai_”. What does the “a” and “i” stand for?

Solution
The “a” stands for “address” and the “i” stands for “info”.

The man page for getaddrinfo says “The getaddrinfo() function is defined for protocol-independent nodename-to-address translation.” taken from http://www.nsc.ru/cgi-bin/www/unix_help/unix-man?getaddrinfo.

Therefore ai_flags, ai_family, ai_scoktype, ai_protocol, ai_addrlen,

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What is Envoy in Kubernetes?

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Question
What is Envoy in Kubernetes?

Answer
“Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. Built on the learnings of solutions such as NGINX, HAProxy, hardware load balancers, and cloud load balancers, Envoy runs alongside every application and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner.

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Does Automation Subsume DevOps or Does DevOps Subsume Automation?

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Question
Is automation bigger than DevOps?

Answer
We think that the canonical answer is yes, automation subsumes DevOps. Some professionals think in terms of automation, and automation existed before DevOps was a word. It is well known that the Toyota Production System has influenced DevOps. Automation played a big role in the success of Sakichi Toyoda.

His “most famous invention was the automatic power loom [“a hand-operated or power-driven apparatus for weaving fabrics”,

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What are Recommended Practices vs. “Best Practices”?

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Background
Facebook’s engineering culture during its earlier days of rapid growth was “move fast and break things.” But the Harvard Business Review says that this era is over.

Problem scenario
You are concerned about recommended practices and “best practices.” You want to be productive and leave no security gaps in your systems that you design/install or allow bugs in your code.

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What is a Hacker?

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Question
You have seen the word “hacker” appear in different contexts. You have seen it used to describe a cybercriminal. Moreover some companies proudly claim that they employ no hackers while only hiring trained software developers. In some articles the term hacker has a positive connotation. What is a hacker?

Answer
“Hacking tends to be a misunderstood topic, and the media likes to sensationalize,

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