DevToolsDigest: Issue #129

The Week in Developer Tools

Introducing Flan Scan: Cloudflare’s Lightweight Network Vulnerability Scanner

Flan Scan is a thin wrapper around Nmap that converts this popular open source tool into a vulnerability scanner with the added benefit of easy deployment. You can get started running a vulnerability scan on your network in a few minutes by following the instructions on the README.

Chromium Blog: Moving Towards a Faster Web

Speed has been one of Chrome’s core principles since the beginning - they're constantly working to give users an experience that is instant as they browse the web. That said, we have all visited web pages we thought would load fast, only to be met by an experience that could have been better.

Introducing Nebula, the Open Source Global Overlay Network from Slack

Nebula is a scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security. It lets you seamlessly connect computers anywhere in the world. Nebula is portable, and runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows. 

CloudForecast: Introduction to AWS Reserved Instances

You might remember buying coupons on Groupon for 50% off a $100 meal at a local restaurant for a frugal date night. In exchange for making a commitment and paying in advance, you’ve locked in a deal for a discounted rate. AWS Reserved Instances (RI) work in similar ways, allowing you to pay steeply discounted rates, compared to paying hourly.

Industry Research

Best Practices: How to Engage Developers with a World-Class API Portal

One of the hottest topics among API providers has to do with how to best engage developers through a developer portal. In this special report, ProgrammableWeb has compiled a comprehensive list of features (based on real world examples) that all developer portals should aspire to.

An Interview on What Makes Postgres Unique (Extensions)

In this excerpt, Dimitri Fontaine interviews Craig Kerstiens of Citus Data for his book, The Art of PostgreSQL, which provides a guide targeted at developers, not just DBAs, that want to become better with their database.

Better Language Models and Their Implications

OpenAI has trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization.

Review of GROQ, A New JSON Query Language

GROQ is a JSON-based query language that was initially developed for Sanity.io as a query and execution solution. GROQ, short for Graph-Relational Object Queries, is principally a method of filtration – it carries on the work that has become so fashionable with implementations like GraphQL, allowing for robust, transformed, and filtered data sets from large bodies of data.

Developer Venture News

Mirantis Acquires Docker Enterprise

Mirantis announced that it has acquired Docker’s Enterprise business and team. Docker Enterprise was very much the heart of Docker’s product lineup, so this sale leaves Docker as a shell of its former, high-flying unicorn self. 

Alpaca Nabs $6M for Stocks API So Anyone Can Build a Robinhood

Stock trading app Robinhood is valued at $7.6 billion, but it only operates in the U.S. Freshly funded fintech startup Alpaca does the dirty work so developers worldwide can launch their own competitors to that investing unicorn. The potential to power the backend of a new generation of fintech apps has attracted a $6 million Series A round for Alpaca led by Spark Capital .

New Relic Snags Early-Stage Serverless Monitoring Startup IOpipe

As we move from a world dominated by virtual machines to one of serverless, it changes the nature of monitoring, and vendors like New Relic certainly recognize that. The company announced it was acquiring IOpipe, a Seattle-based early-stage serverless monitoring startup, to help beef up its serverless monitoring chops.

From The Heavybit Library

What to Read Before 2020: The Best DevTools Content from the Heavybit Library

As 2019 winds down, it's time to catch up on the best devtools content in the Heavybit library. Check out our favorite podcasts, articles & talks from this year.

Early-Stage Sales Process: Focusing on the Right Prospects

Your marketing efforts are putting leads in the pipeline, and you’ve started to pull together a good picture of your buyer’s journey. But something’s still wrong — deals aren’t closing. What’s going on here? It might be time to reevaluate how you’re thinking about your market, and make sure that you’re focusing on the right prospects.

Developer Support Best Practices

What does it take to build and support developer communities? In this article, EVP of Product for Devada Jesse Davis shares insights from the 2019 State of the Developer Report and gives advice to organizations that want to level up their own developer support strategies and practices.