DevToolsDigest: Issue #128

The Week in Developer Tools

Initial Values for Sanity Studio

In this 5-part series, Sanity.io's Developer Advocate, Knut Melvær breaks down how to get started with Initial Values for Sanity Studio. Watch all 5 videos to learn how you can implement values from other documents and APIs, browser APIs and geolocation, and initial value templates.

Continuous Integration That You Can Trust: Announcing CircleCI SOC 2 Compliance

CircleCI is now in a position to provide SOC 2 Type I and FedRAMP Appendix B reports as of November 1, 2019 (October 14, 2019, for FedRAMP). Their SOC 2 Type 2 report will be available in one year. These reports outline their policies for organizational oversight, vendor management, internal corporate governance and risk management processes, and regulatory oversight. 

Industry Research

Ask HN: How Do B2B Startups Sell to Corporations?

There was a long discussion this week on HackerNews about B2B sales with a focus on large deals. Responses varied from insightful to “interesting”. Here’s a curated list of some resources from experts on the topic: 4 Lessons From Selling Enterprise Software (Bowery Capital), When Organic Growth Goes Enterprise (a16z), How to Execute a SaaS Land and Expand Strategy (SaaSX), and more.

How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works

Figma’s multiplayer servers keep track of the latest value that any client has sent for a given property on a given object. This means that two clients changing unrelated properties on the same object won’t conflict, and two clients changing the same property on unrelated objects also won’t conflict.

Jama Software: Embracing On-prem Delivery with DevOps

Maarika Krumhansl, an Engineering Manager at Jama Software, describes the company’s evolution to create a continuous deployment pipeline to both SaaS and on-prem environments by leveraging Docker and Replicated.

Basarat: Scalable Levels of Code Reuse

There is the well understood (and maintained) concept of single purpose OSS libraries, which you can find all over npm. But beyond single purpose libraries is richer, multi objective code reuse. There are few levels at which you can create such reusable code each with progressively more effort required by the core contributors.

Developer Venture News

Databricks Raises $400M at a $6.2B Valuation

A report by Market Research Future pegged the big data analytics market value at $275 billion by 2023, and Gartner recently predicted that AI-derived business revenue will reach $3.9 trillion in 2022. With that sort of capital at stake, it’s no wonder investors are throwing their weight around to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Datadog Fetches New York Tech Sector's Biggest-Ever Venture Capital–Backed IPO

Although the company's share price has fluctuated, it has stayed above the offering price of $27, with a market cap, as of Oct. 31, of nearly $9.78 billion. Datadog now holds the title for the New York tech sector's biggest venture capital–backed IPO, according to Renaissance Capital, an IPO research and fund-management firm.

Microsoft Beats Amazon to Win the Pentagon’s $10B JEDI Cloud Contract

The US government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft. Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads.

From The Heavybit Library

Nick Beecroft - Early-Stage Sales Process: Focusing on the Right Prospects

In this series, 10-year, early-stage sales veteran Nick Beecroft arms founders with an understanding of which processes and tools to focus on first to make early revenue acquisition easier and scalable. In part three of our series on Early Stages Sales Processes, we’ll examine how rethinking how you approach your prospects can help unlock a stalled sales cycle.

Understanding Vulnerability Disclosure with Mårten Mickos & the HackerOne Team

Security vulnerabilities are a reality that every team must face at some point. We asked Mårten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne and members of his security team to share their thoughts on the importance of vulnerability disclosure, the move towards responsible policies, and what teams should do as they prepare to create their own vulnerability disclosure policy.

Rana Mumtaz - Using User Research as a Pre-Product-Market Fit Tactic

There’s no good shortcut to understanding your users. But with some thoughtful conversations and an open mind to feedback, user research can help you build a product that solves a problem, and message that product in a way that helps users see its value more directly.