DevToolsDigest: Issue #296

The Week in Developer Tools

Introducing Tonic Ephemeral

Tonic Ephemeral makes creating isolated test and development databases easy, making it faster to ship features while reducing compute costs. Quickly spin up databases at the click of a button for testing, bug reproduction, demos, and more.

Oracle Goes Vegan: Dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

Oracle has swapped Terraform for the open-source fork OpenTofu under the hood of its Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager. It is now telling customers they “must” make the shift to its new OpenTofu-based version of the migration/provisioning tool by June 30, 2024. The move comes after Hashicorp’s 2023 decision to adopt a more restrictive BSL 1.1. Licence for Terraform and other products.

Industry Research

Lessons Learned from Using LLMs to Evaluate LLMs

These days, new LLMs are being developed and released at a fast pace. Deploying an LLM, however, comes at a price — either monetary or computational — and that price can differ from model to model. So we need a way to evaluate how well LLMs perform various tasks, so we can choose the best model for each task. In the absence of methodological guidelines, several practices and habits have emerged, and they can sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions and poor decisions.

Did GitHub Copilot Really Increase My Productivity?

"I had free access to GitHub Copilot for about a year, I used it, got used to it, and slowly started to take it for granted, until one day it was taken away. I had to re-adapt to a life without Copilot, but it also gave me a chance to look back at how I used Copilot, and reflect - had Copilot actually been helpful to me?"

Developer Venture News

Vercel Completes $250M Series E Round

Vercel said it recently exceeded $100 million in annual revenue and that every month more than 1 million software developers use its Next.js technology, an open-source framework for building web applications. Vercel said it will use the funds to build out its v0 product, which leverages generative artificial intelligence to build user interfaces from text descriptions. Users can tell v0 what they want their websites to look like and v0 will generate the code, eliminating the need for coding skills.

Harness Raises $150 Million in New Financing

Every year, developers waste more than $1 trillion by spending 40%+ of their time working on mundane, non-code-producing work. Their platform empowers software teams to achieve excellence in velocity, quality, efficiency, and governance. The investment will be used strategically to support the expansion of the Harness platform, including the addition of new modules, further integrating generative AI into the platform, and additional investments in the company's go-to-market engine.