DevToolsDigest: Issue #109

The Week in Developer Tools

GitHub Sponsors

Funding developers through GitHub Sponsors is one more way to contribute to open source projects you appreciate. Help developers get the resources they need, and recognize contributors working behind the scenes to make open source better for everyone. With Sponsors, any GitHub user can sponsor any open source developer in the program.

Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution For the Web

The combination of third-party web tracking and ad campaign measurement has led many to conflate web privacy with a web free of advertisements. Online ads and measurement of their effectiveness do not require Site A, where you clicked an ad, to learn that you purchased something on Site B. The only data needed for measurement is that someone who clicked an ad on Site A made a purchase on Site B.

Increment: Open Source, More Productive Git

Git has become the distributed version control system of choice for modern development. Combined with the rise of GitHub (and its competitors), this has made Git a must-have skill for developers. Yet many developers only know the basics—or worse, they cargo code the Git commands they use on a daily basis without really understanding what they are doing.

Managing Multiple Databases in Rails 6

Rails 6 introduces new functionality to configure and manage multiple databases with your application. This post by Citus Data looks at how to configure your databases and route queries to them accordingly.

Industry Research

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: A Look Back on Bessemer's Developer Laws

Six years after launching their eight developer laws, Bessemer Venture Partners add their 2019 amendments and examine how B2D companies continue to run the world. These laws as not just investing criteria that led them to some of the most successful dev-centric businesses, but also practical case studies for entrepreneurs who want to do the same.

A Brief History of OpenTelemetry (So Far)

After many months of planning, discussion, prototyping, more discussion, and more planning, OpenTracing and OpenCensus are merging to form OpenTelemetry, which is now a CNCF sandbox project. The seed governance and technical committees are composed of representatives from Google, LightStep, Microsoft, and Uber, and more organizations are getting involved every day.

How to Successfully Market to Software Developers

There's a lot of content out there about marketing to developers. But it's a pretty specific group of people you're trying to target, and there are definitely things that you can do with developers that you can't do with other groups, and vice versa.

Developer Venture News

Identity Platform Auth0 Raises $103M, Pushing Its Valuation Over $1B

Auth0, a 2013-founded identity and authentication platform, has pushed into unicorn territory with a $1 billion valuation after raising $103 million in its latest Series E round. The company touts more than 7,000 enterprise customers with more than 2.5 billion logins per month. 

Andreessen Pours $22M into PlanetScale’s Database-as-a-Service

PlanetScale’s founders invented the technology called Vitess that scaled YouTube. Now they’re selling it to any enterprise that wants their data both secure and consistently accessible. The potential to be a computing backbone that both competes with and complements Amazon’s AWS has attracted $22M Series A for PlanetScale.

GitHub Acquires Open-Source Bug Zapping Automator Dependabot

GitHub has acquired Dependabot, a tool that helps developers avoid introducing security issues via bugs in open-source libraries. Dependabot automates checks for out-of-date or insecure libraries on which a project depends, and generates pull requests to update them.

From The Heavybit Community

EnterpriseReady Ep. #8: Driving Product Communication with Dave Cole

In episode 8 of EnterpriseReady, Grant is joined by Dave Cole, to discuss what it takes to manage a product portfolio vs just one product, as well as setting up and managing a customer advisory board.

Upcoming Event - June 4: A Discussion on Hyperledger Fabric

Join Blockdaemon, Hyperledger, and Google for a discussion on Hyperledger Fabric with a focus on dev tools, networks and decentralization that will make it easier to implement, manage, and build on top of all of the emerging public and private blockchain networks.

Upcoming Webinar - June 19: Common Automation Pitfalls and Solutions

Automation is trendy but it quickly loses its charm as teams struggle to come up with a test design/strategy that fits their unique needs. Join XBOSoft, Cloudgrey, and Testim for a discussion on how test automation fits in the software development life cycle and how to come up with a good test design/strategy.