2016 has come to an end. For auld lang syne, my dear!

2016 has gotten a pretty bad rap (deservedly so, in my opinion). Let’s try to leave the past where it is, dump the negative energy, and wake up to new opportunities.

I like this time of year for the wrap-up pieces and year in reviews. Here are a few that I enjoyed this week:

Department of Next Year’s Old Tech

Please, for the love of God, do not let leap seconds bite you in the ass ever again. Percona has a great piece for getting this problem solved: Don’t Let a Leap Second Leap on Your Database!

Department of Choice Concepts

Julia Evans wrote a fantastic article (and comic), How to ask good questions. Essentially good questions come from the need to plug information gaps, not from a complete lack of knowledge. Do your research then confirm what you need confirmed. This is a skill more people need to solidify.

I wrote a piece on Ansible Vault for opensource.com. Ansible Vault is a super simple solution to encrypting files and variables natively in Ansible. It is not Hashicorp’s Vault (don’t confuse the two) but Ansible Vault is very handy.

Jeff Geerling wrote up a great piece on why he closes pull requests for his open source projects. It is a pretty simple concept, they are his projects that he uses. If your PR is not useful to the intended use case it is generally closed. Submitting upstream is not a right; fork and go.

Department of Dafuq

The Linux Foundation has created a credit card (yeah… so weird). The Linux Credit Card page states, “For every card activation, the Linux Foundation will receive $50 as well as a percentage of every purchase made with the Linux credit card.” I am scratching my head on this one.

Department of Data Defense

CVE Details has a run down for the Top 50 Vendors By Total Number Of “Distinct” Vulnerabilities in 2016. Shockingly Microsoft is #4. Linux is #12.

Department of Refreshment and Refurbishment

As of tomorrow, PHP 5.6 will no longer get bugfixes, only security fixes for 1 more year. Time to move to PHP 7.1. — Mattias Geniar

Joel Sing pointed out this week that migrating to OpenSSL 1.1 is really (unnecessarily) hard. I have to agree, it should not be as hard as he describes. Want a good example? Compile nmap configured to use OpenSSL 1.1.

DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week