Our Favorite Developer Tools of 2020

Coding Blocks

We start off the year discussing our favorite developer tools of 2020, as Joe starts his traditions early, Allen is sly about his résumé updates, and Michael lives to stream.

For those that read the show notes via their podcast player and find themselves wondering where they can find these show notes on their computer, the answer is simple: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode149. Check it out and join the discussion.

Sponsors

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Survey Says Which hand do you type the 6 key with?

Take the survey at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode149.

News

• Thank you for the new reviews we received this holiday!
  • iTunes: larsankile, 0xACE, Tbetcha33, The_Shrike_, shineycloud
• Watch Joe speak at the virtual San Diego Elastic Meetup, Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 5:00 PM PST, where he is talking about Easy Local Development with Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes using Skaffold.
  • Signup at community.elastic.co.
• Join our game jam January 21 – 24, 2021 and let’s make games!

The Top Tools of 2020

• K9s – A terminal UI to interact with your Kubernetes cluster.
• Popeye – A utility that scans a live Kubernetes cluster and reports potential issues with deployed resources and configurations.
• All things JetBrains, especially IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and DataGrip. Amazing, cross-platform tools that developers from all tech stacks can use.
• Skaffold – Handles the workflow for building, pushing, and deploying your application within Kubernetes, allowing you to focus on writing your code.
• Kustomize – A template-free way to customize Kubernetes application configuration, built into kubectl.
• Oh My Zsh – An open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.
• Netlify – Unites everything teams need to build and run dynamic web experiences, from preview to production, using an intuitive git-based workflow and a powerful serverless platform.
• Jira StopWatch – A desktop tool for recording time spent on different Jira issues.
• Lens – The Kubernetes IDE, Lens provides full situational awareness for everything that runs in Kubernetes, lowering the barrier of entry for those just getting started with Kubernetes, while radically improving productivity for the experienced users.
• Zoom – Keeping you connected wherever you are. Hands down, the best video calling software out there for screen sharing; you can actually read the other person’s screen!
• Prometheus – Power your metrics and alerting with a leading open-source monitoring solution.
• Grafana – The world’s most popular technology used to compose observability dashboards.
• Visual Studio Code – Code editing, redefined. Free and built on open source. Runs everywhere.
  • Favorite VS Code extensions:
    • Bracket Pair Colorizer – Matching brackets can be easily identified in color.
    • GitLens – Supercharges the Git capabilities built into Visual Studio Code.
    • Rainbow CSV – Highlight CSV files and run SQL-like queries.
• Cmder – A software package created out of pure frustration over the absence of nice console emulators on Windows.
• Unraid – Take control of your data, media, applications, and desktops, using just about any combination of hardware.

Resources We Like

• Streaming: Debugging C# in Kubernetes and Skaffold vs Kustomize (YouTube)

Tip of the Week

• Challenging projects every programmer should try (utk.edu)
• More challenging projects every programmer should try (utk.edu)
• Duck DNS – A free dynamic DNS hosted on AWS (duckdns.org)
  • Honorable DNS mentions:
    • 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 – Google Public DNS (Wikipedia)
    • 9.9.9.9/9.9.9.10/9.9.9.11 – Quad9 (Wikipedia)
    • 1.1.1.1/1.1.1.2/1.1.1.3 – Cloudflare’s DNS (Wikipedia)
• MIT’s Missing Semester of CS Education:
  • The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (mit.edu)
  • Missing Semester IAP 2020 (YouTube)
  • 2020 Lectures (mit.edu)