DevToolsDigest: Issue #154
This digest includes news and resources from Contentful, Avo, Demuxed, Stack Overflow, 20VC, and more.
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The Week in Developer Tools
Contentful: Free Community Plan and GraphQL Training
Contentful’s new free forever Community space is designed to accelerate digital development by enabling the developer community to build without barriers, using the latest technologies such as GraphQL in their programming platform/language of choice. The Community space is aimed at empowering individual developers’ personal projects, hack weeks or philanthropic projects.
Demuxed Virtual Conference 2020 Announced
Demuxed, the conference for video engineers is going to be online-native this year from October 27-29. Call for speakers is open until August 15. They're donating 1/3rd of ticket revenue to charities that are working for diversity and inclusion and/or fighting for racial equality.
Industry Research
Avo: How to Get Your Product Metrics Right
Purpose meetings revolutionized engineering buy-in for analytics at QuizUp. Engineers would request purpose meetings before they kicked off feature development because it made their work more efficient and purposeful. If you’re unsure what to track, try the 30 minute Purpose Meeting, that helps align stakeholders on shipping good metrics and highlights the highest-impact lowest-effort tracking.
Craig Kerstiens: Why Startups Fail
The first big reason startups fail is because they're a product in search of a problem. They built something that was interesting and are trying to find a need for it. The other big reason is that they couldn't figure out how to make the business grow and couldn't get all the non engineering pieces working.
Developer Venture News
Stack Overflow: $85M in Series E Funding
Stack Overflow has been a venture backed company for 12 years and their last funding round was in 2015. This investment will allow for a continuation of the work they're doing to establish the foundation for Stack Overflow’s next phase: a leader in products for developers and technologists to collaborate and share knowledge as they build the next generation of applications.
Harry Stebbings Launches a Micro VC Off the Back of His Popular Podcast
Harry Stebbings, the 24-year-old London-based creator and host of The Twenty Minute VC, is launching a micro VC fund of $8.3 million. Called 20VC, the plan is to invest in U.S. startups across various stages alongside “tier 1” co-investors. Micro funds are usually not huge, but they aim to pack a punch by offering other skills in the mix with their smaller investments.
From The Heavybit Library
Doubling Down on Content, Now More than Ever with Mitch Wainer
Over the next 18-24 months, traditional sources of cash will be meaningfully restricted. In this group session, DigitalOcean Co-Founder and Clubhouse CMO Mitch Wainer discussed ways founders can reimagine how they target content work and spend less, while strengthening market position with content.
Erik Dietrich: A Field Guide for Managing Expectations in Content Marketing
Erik Dietrich is a longtime software engineer and software blogger, who eventually combined those pursuits to start a business. His company, Hit Subscribe, matches devtools companies needing content with engineers that want to write about tech. In this post, Erik sets expectations around rank and traffic based on his and clients’ experiences, and outlines the timeline for when new sites can start to see ROI.