New job, new tools

I have been shown a few new tools that are pretty neat...

  • cmder - great replacement for the command prompt, integrations w. other tools
  • MFA: DUO (pushes an accept/deny for JIRA/Confluence stuff)
  • MFA: Authy (+ Chrome extension) for AWS MFA
  • Boxstarter & Chocolatey & AWS S3 & Bitbucket
  • AWS in general
  • Greenshot (replacement for snip tool/snagIt - free)
And because we like automating this sorta thing:
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

cinst -y appName
...
cinst -y lastappName


And you have boxstarter do a lot of that for you, handle restarts, Win updates, etc.  This is all googleable and somewhat old hat now, but still really amazing to see for the first time.  Complete game-changer.

One of my initial tasks is automating/streamlining the dev workstation config/setup.  At first I thought it was a bit help-desk-ish, but there is significant business value in getting the dev startup time reduced.  Also gives me time to ease into the rest of the systems.  The real trick with this process is getting it to also be used to update dev workstations (e.g. VS2015).

Expect more to come on this - for such an obviously global issue, you don't find many clear posts on doing this.

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