DevToolsDigest: Issue #84

This week's digest includes news and resources from GitHub, npm, Rainforest QA, LaunchDarkly, Citus Data, TechCrunch, Cloud Guru, and more.

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Heavybit's DevToolsDigest is a weekly curated selection of the best resources, product updates, jobs, and discussions in the developer tools industry.

OCT 19, 2018

5 MIN

The Week in Developer Tools

GitHub launches Actions, Its Workflow Automation Tool

For the longest time, GitHub was all about storing source code and sharing it either with the rest of the world or your colleagues. This week the company launched GitHub Actions, a new tool that will allow developers to not just host code on the platform but also run it.

npm And The Future of JavaScript

View Laurie Voss's slide deck from Node+JS Interactive where he covers the current npm ecosystem and describes its bright future. Laurie is the Co-Founder and COO of npm Inc.

The Boom and Bust of QA

Quality Assurance has a dirty secret. If you’ve ever worked at a software company, you’ve probably known the frustration of ineffective QA. Read more in the post from Rainforest CEO Fred Stevens-Smith.

Dear AWS, We Need To Talk About Your Service Names

Dear AWS, AWS re:Invent is coming up soon. I’m sure you have 50,000 new services coming out, and are now in the process of naming them all. I’m gonna be blunt: you gotta get better at naming these things — because the current state is a mess.

LaunchDarkly Visual Studio Code Extension

The daily life of a developer involves spending a large amount of time in a text editor. Sometimes, switching context out of your editor to do things such as checking a feature flag’s configuration can be distracting and result in wasted time. To help alleviate this pain, LaunchDarkly has released an update to their extension that brings some new convenient features to Visual Studio Code.

Commenting Your Postgres Database

In this post from the Citus Data blog, Craig Kerstiens shares how he tries to make his SQL and database as easy to understand for someone not already familiar with it. One of the biggest tools for that is comments.

Epsagon Has Launched

The Epsagon team were incredibly excited to announce that Epsagon have officially launched their observability and cost monitoring platform for serverless applications. It's available on the official website and includes a free tier.

Industry Research

The 3 Next Big Programming Languages: GitHub's Rising Stars For 2018

These are the languages with the largest growth in contributors to code repositories over the past year.

Kubernetes Won, And That’s OK.

Back in the deep recesses of history (and, given that this is technology, history is a fluid term. I’m speaking here of five years ago), Cloud Foundry was incubated within VMware as an answer to the pretty obvious market requirement for a platform that went beyond servers (be they virtual or physical) and which automated more of the operational aspects of infrastructure.

The Business Case For Serverless

In this post, Forrest Brazeal highlights some of the key ways Trek10 has seen value realized while building serverless systems for their clients.

Venture Announcements

Twilio to Buy SendGrid for $2 Billion in Bid to Expand Products

Twilio Inc. will buy SendGrid Inc. for $2 billion in an all-stock transaction to boost its suite of communication tools. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2019. The boards of both companies have approved the transaction.

Docker Has Raised $92 Million In New Funding

Docker, the company that did more to create today’s modern containerized computing environment than any other independent company, has raised $92 million of a targeted $192 million funding round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.