DevToolsDigest: Issue #124

The Week in Developer Tools

Announcing Stack Overflow’s New CEO, Prashanth Chandraseka

Prashanth worked at Capgemini as a management consultant and Barclays as an investment banker in their technology group before joining Rackspace. Under his leadership, Rackspace successfully pivoted from a leading managed hosting company to a cloud services company. And he did this while working with developers both inside Rackspace and outside.

Facebook’s Suspension of ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Apps Reveals Wider Privacy Issues

Facebook revaled that it had suspended tens of thousands of apps for improperly sucking up users’ personal information and other transgressions, a tacit admission that the scale of its data privacy issues was far larger than it had previously acknowledged.

Open Policy Agent

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a general-purpose policy engine with uses ranging from authorization and admission control to data filtering. OPA provides greater flexibility and expressiveness than hard-coded service logic or ad-hoc domain-specific languages.

Security in Depth: Introducing Sqreen In-App WAF and App Inventory

Sqreen has built the industry’s first Application Security Management (ASM) platform, which leverages microagents embedded in web applications to identify and automatically protect against threats in real time. It’s a single platform for security and developer teams to scale their security without impacting velocity.

Industry Research

Superhuman: Performance Metrics for Blazingly Fast Web Apps

Performance metrics are surprisingly challenging to get right. On the one hand, it is hard to design metrics that accurately represent the user experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to make metrics that are usefully precise. As a result, many teams cannot trust their performance data.

Comparing Database Types: How Database Types Evolved to Meet Different Needs

Your choice of database type can have a profound impact on what kind of operations your application can easily perform, how you conceptualize your data, and the features that your database management system offers you during development and runtime.

Static First: Pre-Generated JAMstack Sites with Serverless Rendering as a Fallback

One of the principles of JAMstack is that of pre-rendering. In other words, it generates your site into a collection of static assets in advance, so that it can be served to your visitors with maximum speed and minimum overhead from a CDN or other optimized static hosting environment.

Developer Venture News

Sentry Raises $40M Series C: Rethinking Application Performance Monitoring

With the explosion of devices—from smartphones to smart devices—software is largely run on customer devices. While Sentry currently offers rich error monitoring to replace logs and bring intelligence to modern applications, they look forward to pushing innovation in the application space. 

Gatsby Raises $15M Series A for Its Modern Web Development Platform

Gatsby, a platform that uses modern web technologies like React and GraphQL to help developers build better sites faster, announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by CRV. 

Snyk Acquires DevSecCon

Together, Snyk and the DevSecCon team, led by Francois Raynaud, will partner to maintain a vendor neutral home dedicated to growing and strengthening the DevSecOps community with additional support and resources, including 9 global conferences in the remainder of 2019 and 2020. 

Honeycomb.io Raises $11.4M to Gelp Developers Observe and Debug Their Apps

As companies continue to expand the number of cloud-based tools and apps that are used to run their businesses, DevOps continues to grow as a field of IT to help developers meet those demands.In one of the more recent moves, Honeycomb.io, which developers use to observe code on live apps, microservices and other processes in order to identify where something is not working, announced a Series A of $11.4 million.

From The Heavybit Library

What Founders Should Know about Building a Distributed Team

There are a lot of great things about building distributed teams, including tapping into fresh pools of talent to help you build a better team, faster. It’s not surprising that many teams are embracing this model as they grow. But distributed teams have their own challenges.

EnterpriseReady Ep. #15: Self-Protecting Software with Jeff Williams of Contrast Security

In episode 15 of EnterpriseReady, Grant is joined by Jeff Williams, Co-Founder and CTO of Contrast Security. The two discuss the vast quantity of competing AppSec standards, the creation of the OWASP Top 10, and the future of application security.