DevToolsDigest: Issue #305
This week's digest includes news and resources from Sauce Labs, Tailscale, Cortex, and more.
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Heavybit's DevToolsDigest is a weekly curated selection of the best resources, product updates, jobs, and discussions in the developer tools industry.
The Week in Developer Tools
To Tune or Not to Tune? A Guide to Leveraging Your Data with LLMs
The first question to consider is: do you need the model to always give a citation of a source grounded in your data? If yes, you will need to use RAG. If you don’t have those requirements, you’ll need to decide if prompt engineering is enough, or if you need to tune the model. If you choose tuning, then you’ll need to consider tuning options in accordance with how specific and difficult to quantify your desired model’s behavior is.
How Not to Cause the Next Global Outage
On July 19, the world experienced what would be the largest tech outage worldwide. If you’re a software developer or tester, you've likely faced the frustration of a system failing right when it’s most critical. Did you know the complexity of today’s software is a significant reason behind these issues? It’s not just an occasional problem; it's a global challenge.
The New Internet
A lot of day-to-day things that used to be easy for developers, are now hard. That was unexpected. The tech industry has evolved into an absolute mess. And it’s getting worse instead of better! Our tower of complexity is now so tall that we seriously consider slathering LLMs on top to write the incomprehensible code in the incomprehensible frameworks so we don’t have to.
Industry Research
The 2024 State of Developer Productivity
The topic of developer productivity isn’t new, but the environment in which it’s now discussed has changed dramatically. In late 2023, new tension over how to measure and improve productivity put us in a stalemate over which metrics really matter. But instead of debating whether deployment frequency is a good measure, what if we asked what’s keeping teams from deploying frequently to begin with?
The End of the Everything Cloud
Longtime customers know there are two distinct categories of AWS services. Category 1 contains the gold-plated, inner-circle, first-ballot Hall-of-Fame services like EC2, S3, DynamoDB, etc. These are the moneymakers, the heavy hitters, the Babe Ruth and Willie Mays of the cloud. If one of them falls over, the entire internet has a bad day. Category 2 contains … everything else.
Developer Venture News
Open Source Startup FOSSA is Buying StackShare
Open source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare. StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build applications. This encompasses everything from which front-end JavaScript framework to use to which cloud provider to use for specific tasks.
Google, Wiz, and the Courage to Turn Down $23 Billion
It’s not controversial to say that self-confidence is a prerequisite for founding a successful company: When the chips are down, you have to believe in yourself and your vision to get you through. But there’s confidence, and then there’s confidence. It takes a certain something special to walk away from an acquisition offer.