How to install Elasticsearch and Kibana on Linux
Jul09

How to install Elasticsearch and Kibana on Linux

If you’re keen to learn Elasticsearch, the famous open source search engine based on the open source Lucene library, then there’s no better way than to install it locally. The process is outlined in detail on the Elasticsearch website, but the official instructions have a lot more detail than necessary if you’re a beginner. This article takes a simplified approach. read...

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Sysadmin vs SRE: What's the difference?
Jul09

Sysadmin vs SRE: What's the difference?

In the IT world, there has always been a pull between generalist and specialist. The stereotypical sysadmin falls in the generalist category 99 times out of 100. The site reliability engineer (SRE) role is specialized, however, and grew out of the needs of one of the first companies to know real scale: Google. Ultimately, these two roles have the same goal for the applications whose infrastructure they operate: providing a good...

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Open education: There isn't an app for that
Jul09

Open education: There isn't an app for that

In 2010, I confronted a problem common to all public school leaders: How do we optimize our limited funding to bring powerful learning technology to thousands of students? Faced with an end-of-life fleet of student laptops, district-wide budget cuts, and teachers pleading for more technology, I made a small bet that open source software could be an affordable path forward. read...

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