DevToolsDigest: Issue #183

The Week in Developer Tools

Introducing Delta Sharing: An Open Protocol for Secure Data Sharing

Data sharing has become critical in the modern economy as enterprises look to securely exchange data with their customers, suppliers and partners. Databricks launched a new open source project that simplifies cross-organization sharing: Delta Sharing, an open protocol for secure real-time exchange of large datasets, which enables secure data sharing across products for the first time.

Stacked Git: Manage Commits as a Stack of Patches

Stacked Git, StGit for short, is an application for managing Git commits as a stack of patches. With a patch stack workflow, multiple patches can be developed concurrently and efficiently, with each patch focused on a single concern, resulting in both a clean Git commit history and improved productivity.

Industry Research

Why (and How) GitHub is Adopting OpenTelemetry

Over the years, GitHub engineers have developed many ways to observe how their systems behave. They mostly make use of statsd for metrics, the syslog format for plain text logs and OpenTracing for request traces. While they've somewhat standardized what they emit, they tend to solve the same problems over and over in each new system developed.

How Image Search Works at Dropbox

Photos are among the most common types of files in Dropbox, but searching for them by filename is even less productive than it is for text-based files. Wouldn’t it be great if Dropbox could pore through all those images for you instead, and call out those which best match a few descriptive words that you dictated?

Developer Venture News

Stack Overflow Acquired by Prosus for $1.8B

The legendary Q&A website for programmers (and probably one of the most copy-and-pasted sites on the internet) Stack Overflow is being acquired. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Prosus (the primary shareholder of Chinese gaming mega co/WeChat developer, Tencent) will acquire Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

Here’s Which VC-Backed Companies Are Going Public Via SPAC This Year (So Far)

Going public through a special purpose acquisition company is officially mainstream. Special purpose acquisition companies, once looked down upon by Wall Street-types as a less respectable way to go public, have been forming and going public at an unprecedented pace this year.

From the Heavybit Library

Orbit Just Went Live, Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal

Developer advocacy and community is a must-have for bottom-up organizations. Heavybit led Orbit’s pre-Seed round just over 18 months ago and as of writing this post, the team just launched to the general public alongside the announcement of a $15M Series A round with more than 1500 teams already using the platform (CircleCI, CNCF, you name it).