DevToolsDigest: Issue #2

In this week’s Dev Tools Digest, Heavybit compiles news of recent and upcoming events, presentations and product releases from a community of developer-based companies.

GitHub Introduces Scientist 1.0

Earlier this week, Github engineers announced the release of Scientist 1.0, a Ruby library useful for rewriting large-scale application components. This is a tool used by GitHub developers for “experiments” created around original pieces of code and used for side-by-side update testing and comparison. Read more about GitHub’s Scientist implementation here.

In the week that preceded Scientist’s release, GitHub services were unavailable for a little more than two hours due to an unexpected power failure. The company apologized to users in a blog post that described the chain of events that contributed to the recovery time and laid out preventative steps to keep what was an uncharacteristic disruption from happening again.

Meteor’s Flagship Event

Meteor, an open-source application framework for JavaScript, recapped their inaugural Meteor Night in a post that included summaries and speaker videos. The event took place at the company’s San Francisco headquarters and included presentations on educational gaming with Classcraft, adapting for Electron desktop apps with Meteor Electron, as well as a showcase of Meteor’s role in the production of several apps in development.

The second Meteor Night takes place February 18 at Meteor HQ, and can be streamed live or watched on demand following the event.

Google Search’s Amit Singhal to Retire

Head of Google search engineering Amit Singhal announced plans to retire from his 15-year engineering career with Google to focus on philanthropic work, with the date set for February 26.

“It fills me with pride to see what we have built in the last fifteen years. Search has transformed people’s lives; over a billion people rely on us. Our mission of empowering people with information and the impact it has had on this world cannot be overstated,” he writes.

John Giannandrea, Google’s AI research lead, has been slated to take Singhal’s position. Google’s move to advance AI development in the role rings familiar with Slack’s hire of Noah Wise to head the company’s Search, Learning and Intelligence initiative as mentioned in last week’s digest.

GoSF at Uber

Iron.io posts a recap of the first GoSF meetup of 2016, held at the San Francisco Uber offices. Presentations included background on Intel’s Go-based telemetry framework Snap as well as Uber’s use of tools based in Go runtime.

Next on the Go agenda is a Go 1.6 release party to take place February 17 at Docker headquarters.

Mesos Releases 0.27.0

Cluster manager Apache Mesos announces the release of Mesos 0.27.0. According to their announcement, the latest features include multiple disk support for reliable I/O performance and the introduction of implicit roles as an update to the previously used whitelist functionality. Mesos’ guide for upgrading can be found here.

Developing Relationships at Keen IO

Keen IO Developer Evangelist Taylor Barnett recently posted slides, video and written reflections on her talk, “Building Community with Developer Love,” that took place back in November as part of the API Strategy and Practice Conference. She emphasizes the importance of cultivating a “developer love circle” to strengthen the two-way street of developer and platform communications.

Cleaner Data Pipelines with Treasure Data and Logz.io

Effective data analytics infrastructure is the topic of Treasure Data Chief Evangelist John Hammink’s latest blog post. He points out that a lack of shared tools and pipelines can lead to both disjointed collaborations and poor analytics. Included in the post is the webinar that took place last month with Logz.io’s Asaf Yigal in which Hammink and Yigal explore solutions in using Logz.io’s DevOps tools along with analyst services offered by Treasure Data.

New From Heavybit

Heavybit released four podcasts this week, and they’re ready for you to dive into. In episode two of Don’t Make Me Code, Opsee’s Steve Boak and David Dollar of Convox discuss solutions to the challenges of onboarding developers to technical products. In Road To Growth, Runscope co-founder John Sheehan speaks with host Yaron Sadka on the importance of community-building and using unique tactics for unique products.

Zero To Won is hosted by RainforestQA CEO Fred Stevens-Smith, and he talks with Atlassian president Jay Simons about his software-building approach. Round out your podcast marathon with Venture Confidential to hear Vas Natarajan of Accel Partners discuss the current fundraising environment and evolving open source business models.

Finally, don’t forget to watch Harrison Metal founder Michael Dearing’s Speaker Series presentation titled “Executive Communication.” In this talk, Dearing outlines straightforward yet effective methods for solving problems and reaching out to both your team and the users it serves.

For more developer-based news and content, check back with the Heavybit blog, or browse Heavybit’s Library for in-depth talks from industry leaders on how to grow your company. Is there some news, events or developer-related content you’d like to see on the next Heavybit Dev Tools Digest? Contact us, we’d love to hear from you.