Some Of My Favorite Tools Or Sites

Owned by Roger Cruz
Last updated: May 16, 2024
6 min read

Intro

An article where I keep favorite tools or websites which make my job easier.



Agile



Software Development 





Coding Sites

 

Cluster Management

  • Pacemaker is an open source cluster resource manager (CRM), a system that coordinates resources and services that are managed and made highly available by a cluster.

    • In essence, Corosync enables servers to communicate as a cluster, while Pacemaker provides the ability to control how the cluster behaves.

Countdown Timers

  • virtualbreak.org helps you provide beautiful countdown screens for various breaks in virtual trainings and workshops.

 

Cloud Application Monitoring Tools

Documentation

  • This repository contains the source content and code for Kong's documentation website. It's built using Jekyll and deployed with Netlify.

 

  • Sphinx is a "tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation. 



  • Read the Docs simplifies software documentation by automating building, versioning, and hosting of your docs for you.



  • ExDoc is a tool to generate documentation for your Elixir projects. To see an example, you can access Elixir's official docs.

    • I learned about this tool from Broadway's documentation.  I really like this style. 

    • Automatically generates HTML and EPUB documents from your API documentation

    • Support for custom pages and guides (in addition to the API reference)

    • Support for custom grouping of modules, functions, and pages in the sidebar

    • Generates HTML documentation accessible online and offline

    • Responsive design with built-in layout for phones and tablets

    • Customizable logo on the generated documentation

    • Each documented entry contains a direct link back to the source code



  • MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation.

DDOS Attacks

 

  • BreakingPoint Cloud - 5GB of outbound traffic on free account

    Gain actionable insight into your Microsoft Azure DDoS protection

    • Validate Microsoft Azure DDoS protection service defenses for your Azure resources.

    • Optimize your DDoS response process to reduce the time to detect and react to attacks

    • Accelerate time to meet your DDoS compliance requirements

    • Train your network security teams

Free Icons, Pictures and Images



  • Pixabay - my favorite for license-free pictures, images, icons, music and vidoes!  Can be used commercially

  • Flat Icon - free icons

  • The Noun Project - Places license in the icons image itself

  • Unsplash The internet’s source for visuals. - Commercial and non-commercial purposes

 



Drawing / Diagrams / Flowcharts



 

Voting, Surveys and Kudos

 

Editors

Monico Editor

The Monaco Editor is the code editor that powers VS Code. A good page describing the code editor's features is here.

It is licensed under the MIT License and supports Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

The Monaco editor is not supported in mobile browsers or mobile web frameworks.

Find more information at the Monaco Editor repo.

 

Electronics

 

 

 



Groups And Meetups



Hex Editors

 

Learning Platforms

  • learnondemandsystems.com (lab on demand) is the system Microsoft uses for its Azure training labs

  • for free programming classes.

  • Udemy

  • LinkedIn Learning



Logging

  • Really love Splunk's search capabilities

  • Microsoft Log Parser v2.2 for parsing event, CSV, XML files with SQL queries.  There is also a GUI interface from Lizards.



Network Performance / Throughput

 

  • iPerf, which works on both Windows and Linux and has both client and server modes. It is limited to 3Gbps for Windows VMs.

    • This tool does not perform any read/write operations to disk. It solely produces self-generated TCP traffic from one end to the other. It generates statistics based on experimentation that measures the bandwidth available between client and server nodes. When testing between two nodes, one node acts as the server, and the other node acts as a client.

    • Download iPerf. For details, see iPerf documentation.

    • A few more performance tools discussed here Validate VPN throughput to a virtual network - Azure VPN Gateway.

Security Publications 

 

Stacks

  • Find out what technology stacks / tools different companies are using:



Distributed Tracing

  • OpenCensus is an open source, vendor-agnostic, single distribution of libraries to provide metrics collection and distributed tracing for services.

    • It also enables the open source community to enable distributed tracing with popular technologies like Redis, Memcached, or MongoDB.

  • .NET distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry

  • OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral library that supports several services. For more information, see Collect distributed traces with OpenTelemetry.

    • OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you analyze your software’s performance and behavior.

  • Application Insights is a full-featured service provided by Microsoft. For more information, see Collect distributed traces with Application Insights.

  • W3C Trace Context

  • For Java Zipkin Brave:

    • Brave is a distributed tracing instrumentation library. Brave typically intercepts production requests to gather timing data, correlate and propagate trace contexts.

 

Online Magazines And Blogs



  • Free Software Magazine - Free Software Magazine (also known as FSM and originally titled The Open Voice) is a Web site that produces a (generally bi-monthly) mostly free-content online magazine about free software.  Founded in 2004

 

 

Comment/Discussion Platform

Add discussion area to posts

Recruiting Sites

Scheduling Sites

 

Slack Channels

  • Boston DevOps - A great resource of local DevOps talent and information



Vulnerability Scanners

 

  • Automated Security Validation (SecVal)

Windows



  • PsExec from PsTools allows you to impersonate the Local System account so you can execute actions that would  other wise be restricted via ACLs:  .\psexec  /s cmd.exe



Workflow Automation

 

  • Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically

  • IFTTT is short for If This Then That, and is the best way to integrate apps, devices, and services. We help devices, services, and apps work together in new and powerful ways.

Surveys



SLA Computations

 

 

 

 

Terminal Emulators



  • ConEmu (short for Console emulator) is a free and open-source tabbed terminal emulator for Windows

    • ConEmu-Maximus5 aims to be handy, comprehensive, fast and reliable terminal window where you may host any console application developed either for WinAPI (cmd, powershell, far) or Unix PTY (cygwin, msys, wsl bash).  As Windows console window enhancement (local terminal emulator), ConEmu presents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications (like PuTTY for example) as one customizable tabbed GUI window with various features.