DevToolsDigest: Issue #91

The Week in Developer Tools

Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI at Microsoft Connect(); 2018

Microsoft announced its approach to helping you be more productive when developing apps, including the introduction of .NET Core 3.0. They also started decoupling many parts of the Windows development platform, so you can adopt technologies incrementally. 

Details About the npm Event-Stream Incident

On the morning of November 26th, npm’s security team was notified of a malicious package that had made its way into event-stream, a popular npm package. 

Etsy’s Experiment with Immutable Documentation

Writing documentation is like trying to hit a moving target. The way a system works changes constantly, so as soon as you write a piece of documentation for it, it starts to get stale.

Announcing GitLab Serverless

GitLab is the only single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. It will release GitLab Serverless in GitLab 11.6 to allow enterprises to plan, build, and manage serverless workloads with the rest of their code from within the same GitLab UI.

DigitalOcean Launches Its Container Service

DigitalOcean’s service first launched into early access in May. In total, about 30,000 developers singed up for early access and the team now feels that it’s ready for a wider rollout.

License Changes for Confluent Platform

This new license allows you to freely download, modify, and redistribute the code (very much like Apache 2.0 does), but it does not allow you to provide the software as a SaaS offering.

Industry Research

JIRA is an Antipattern

Atlassian’s JIRA began life as a bug-tracking tool. Its genesis as a bug tracker, and its resulting use of “tickets” as its fundamental, defining unit, have made its maps especially difficult to follow.

Back to the Future with Relational NoSQL

This article outlines some of the consistency issues NoSQL databases have with distributed transactions, showing how FaunaDB has solved the problems using the Calvin protocol and a virtual clock.

Three Pillars with Zero Answers: Towards a New Scorecard for Observability

Since microservices were literally designed to prevent “two-pizza” devops teams from knowing about each other, it turns out that it’s incredibly difficult for any individual to understand the whole, or even their nearest neighbor in the service graph.

Waterfall

Everybody likes to laugh about the Waterfall methodology. Where does it come from? In 1970, Winston Royce published "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems."

Serverless Computing: One Step FW, Two Steps Back

After 10 years of people writing cloud programs in legacy sequential languages like Java, the public cloud providers are finally proposing a programming model for the cloud. They are calling it Serverless Computing, or more descriptively “Functions as a Service” (FaaS).

AWS Outperforms GCP in the 2018 Cloud Report

AWS outperformed GCP on applied performance (e.g., TPC-C) and a variety of micro-benchmarks (e.g, CPU, network, and I/O) as well as cost. 

Netflix: Our Learnings from Adopting GraphQL

As GraphQL continues to thrive and mature, Netflix looks forward to learning from all the amazing things that the community can build and solve with it. 

Developer Venture News

Slack Taps Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO

Slack is rounding up its underwriting syndicate and hopes to fetch a valuation of well over $10 billion in its IPO, whose exact timing will depend on market conditions.

Tigera Raises $30M Series B for Its Kubernetes Security and Compliance Platform

Tigera, a startup that offers security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes container deployments, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors Madrona, NEA and Wing also participated in this round.

LogDNA Raises $25M to Simplify Server Data Logging

LogDNA’s eponymous analytics suite is now used by more than 2,000 customers and tens of thousands of users, growth that’s boosted revenue five times over the previous year.

Fintech Startup Plaid Raises $250M at a $2.65B Valuation

Plaid builds infrastructure that allows a consumer to interact with their bank account on the web through a number of third-party applications, like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub.

From The Heavybit Library

Tugce Erten: Don't Cargo Cult Your Pricing

In this Speaker Series, PagerDutys Director of Pricing Strategy Tugce Erten demystifies some of the seemingly dark art of pricing strategy. 

High Leverage: Ep. #3, Modern On-Prem with Replicated's Grant Miller

In episode 3 of High Leverage, Joe speaks with Grant Miller, Replicated founder and creator of EnterpriseReady, on how companies are taking a new approach to running third-party applications.