Compendium of Knowledge and Helpful Things - Friday 8th January, 2021

Welcome to my first Compendium of Knowledge and Helpful Things:

• The Dev Coach - AWS Networking Fundamentals: A Simple Guide for Software Engineers.

  This post is primarily aimed at getting developers up to speed with networking on AWS, but includes useful fundamental nuggets, such as the address ranges reserved for private networks (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16 since you didn’t ask) and how netmasks (e.g. 255.0.0.0) work. As ever I was amused and amazed at how much I knew, and slightly scared at the amounts that I didn’t know!

• Cidr.Xyz - An Interactive Ip Address And Cidr Range Visualizer

  This calculator (linked from AWS Networking Fundamentals) provides visualisations on subnet ranges (e.g. 10.0.0.0/8).

• Scott Hanselman’s 2021 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

  I’ve read Scott’s blog for more years than I can remember. This list of tools is by no means comprehensive, and it won’t be to everyone’s taste either. But that’s not really the point. What it does really well is serve as a good starting point for developers old and new.

• Renaming your master branch to main in Github👩‍💻

  It’s a minor step, and it’s not going to put right the evils of centuries, but using the name master is offensive to many. Of course there are other ways. You can also configure your git to init with a main branch.

• Jabra Evolve2 85 ANC Headset

  England went into a new lockdown at the start of the year, and this time my wife is also working from home. As I spend much of my time talking to fellow developers, I decided to investigate some Active Noise Cancelling headsets, I had a look around and found favourable reviews so decided to plump for these. (My choice is drivenin part by knowing that my employers configuration is compatible with Jabra equipment.)