ownCloud is a well-known suite of open source collaboration software that provides similar functionality to DropBox, Google Docs, or Microsoft OneDrive. A new version called ownCloud Infinite Scale (oCIS) was released in 2022. Infinite Scale has been completely re-architected and re-written in the Go language to …

Working with containers and virtual machines means that you spend most of your time on the command line. The default Bash shell in Linux does the job, and it's always available on any Linux box, but the Z shell (or zsh) includes a metric tonne more functionality like plugin and theme support that will make your command …

How often have you read that Docker containers are like lightweight virtual machines? But are they really? Sure, containers virtualise computing resources, but treating them like lightweight virtual machines trivializes their impact on system architectures and leads to anti-patterns. And why are they called …

This post takes a look at South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act from the perspective of a software architect. It is not a slog through a thicket of legalese, or a route march through ISO/IEC 27001, but a high-level tour of those sections of the Act that you should think about if your job is to build or …

If you don't like the idea of storing your personal or corporate data on a public cloud, and if you have your own hardware and technical skills, consider deploying Nextcloud, a software suite written in PHP that you can run on-premise that provides similar functionality as DropBox, Google Docs or Microsoft OneDrive. …

I have been digging into GitHub Pages as an alternative blogging platform in case Blogger follows Google+ to the Great Big BitBucket in the Sky. I looked into WordPress as an alternative to Blogger but GitHub Pages offers a simpler escape route, so this post describes how to create and maintain a personal website on …

iDempiere is an open source, web-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that has been built with tools from the Java world. Instead of using a build automation tool like Maven or Gradle, the iDempiere team used Buckminster to manage the build. We tackled OSGi in an earlier post, now Buckminster as well? OK, …