DevToolsDigest: Issue #12

The Dev Tools Digest returns with product developments from Opsee, as well as highlights from OpenStack and Oracle surveys. CircleCI and Gradle cover how to speed up build processes.

Keeping Track of Time

Opsee’s AWS monitoring services just got a new feature: round-trip time metrics. An eye on RTT latency adds another level to Opsee health checks that can be used to set assertions and trigger alerts for issues including dependency timeouts, according to a recent announcement on the Opsee blog. With this latest rollout, Opsee responses will now include RTT metadata in all responses.

Survey Says

The April 2016 OpenStack survey was recently published, highlighting responses from 1,603 community members and 1,111 organizations, on topics including open-source cloud services. Findings included 57% of respondents used Ceph, the most popular storage option for OpenStack in the past four surveys (of seven since 2013) and Ubuntu as the top choice for deployments.

In a post on the Takipi blog, the results of a survey conducted by Oracle Java Language Architect Brian Goetz showed that most respondents approved of a new JDK Enhancement Proposal, JEP 286. The proposal would affect Java coding language by replacing the current, more specific variables syntax with var/val keywords. According to the survey, 74% of the responding developers welcomes these less verbose functions.

The Need for Speed

In a recent post, CircleCI lays out how they speed up slow builds. Methods described in the post include source and dependency caching, for faster retrieval from servers and disk. Also, parallelism allows for simultaneous testing across instances, and auto-split tests reduce build time. An on-demand build fleet prevents code/data leaks, as well as other potential build-environment issues, for providing faster build run times.

Modern builds do a lot, and they can be bogged down things like testing and packaging, not to mention container deployment, according to a post by the folks at Gradle. The post covers ways to improve build performance, a hot topic at Gradle and the driving force behind Continuous Build features the company introduced last year.

New From Heavybit

In the latest episode of The Pitch Room, Heavybit PR Lead Malia Powers is joined by Marcy Campbell, SVP WW Sales & Business Development at Qubole, to discuss topics including how marketing and sales teams can work together to improve business performance.

In Don’t Make Me Code, hosts Steve Boak of Opsee and Convox’s David Dollar meet with Gonçalo Borrêga of Outsystems. They focus on training devs in your product and giving user value more visibility.

In a Speaker Series presentation filmed earlier this month, Andy Raskin, former Director of Product Marketing at Mashery, covers the critical elements of a company/product story with LaunchDarkly Head of Marketing Andrea Echstenkamper.

For more developer-based news and content, check back with the Heavybit blog, or browse Heavybit’s Library for in-depth talks from industry leaders on how to grow your company. Is there some news, events or developer related content you’d like to see on the next Heavybit Dev Tools Digest? Contact us, we’d love to hear from you.