Lessons Learned and News in March 2021

This is what I learned in March 2021:

My colleague Sönke gave a great introduction to AWS CDK at the most recent HackTalk. The Cloud Development Kit is a way to programmatically build infrastructure on AWS.
Here’s a nice article on the relatively new Windows Terminal. The main feature is the “real” Linux terminal within Windows.
In my quest to get more familiar with AWS, I installed the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains. Via access keys, this plugin provides an alternative access to AWS resources directly from within IDEA. That way, you can view SQS messages, analyze CloudWatch logs, access S3 buckets and much more. Multiple AWS accounts are also supported.
A while ago, I purchased my new ZSA Moonlander keyboard. Since then, I’m optimizing my typing and hotkeys. Here’s an article about how to get the context key working with the Moonlander and IntelliJ IDEA, including an update to use the “Application” keycode.
Here’s an article about great online marketing in IT.
I was made aware of the “replace in all opened files” feature of Notepad++ that let’s you replace a string in all opened files. That is perfect for changing many scripts at once, for example.

Notepad Plus Plus Replace

Books I read:

“Friend of a Friend” by David Burkus. A great book about how social networks are built and used. Here are my main insights.

This is what I’m working on right now / planning to do in the near future / other stuff:

I published the first newsletter for my upcoming book “Developer on the Stage”. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. This project has a lot of my attention. Sadly, I suffered a major setback lately which will postpone the website and the publication of the book. I already activated plan B to launch as fast as possible.
Working on the book and reflecting on what to do next, I had some important insights. The main train of thought is to bundle all my activities together under one concept / slogan / name. This could make my mission statement more transparent and understandable. A creative process like that will take some time, but the first steps towards implementation are already underway.