DevToolsDigest: Issue #64

The Week in Developer Tools

Documenting Microservices in ReadMe

Many companies are breaking larger codebases into microservices, so different teams can work on parts of the site at different paces. They're like APIs, except for an internal audience. Like any API, they need to be documented! Check out ReadMe's guide.

Segment's Centrifuge: a Reliable System for Delivering Billions of Events Per Day

Segment was excited to share the architecture for Centrifuge–their system for reliably sending billions of messages per day to hundreds of public APIs. This post explores the problems Centrifuge solves, as well as the data model we use to run it in production.

Twilio Engineer Shares How They Achieve Five 9s of Availability

In a recent tech talk on SD Times — Managing the Performance of Applications in the Microservices Era — Tyler Wells, Director of Engineering at Twilio, shared his insights on how to effectively manage the performance of microservices-based applications and how they achieve five 9s of availability and success.

Lambda Internals: Exploring AWS Lambda Parts 1 & 2

The main advantage of Lambda is that you can focus solely on your code. No more thinking about web-servers, machines, scalability and other issues for which you REALLY don’t care. Upload your code, say the magic words (aka serverless invoke) and your code is executed. However, just because you CAN ignore those things doesn’t mean you have to, right?

Clearbit: The Unfair Advantage of Data and Automation

Data, personalization, and automation have long been terms most commonly used by enterprise tech companies. Until recently, it was incredibly rare to find smaller teams that were able to leverage data as effectively as more resource-rich companies. Today, Clearbit looks at two companies who have tackled some of their hardest scaling problems by combining data and automation.

John Montgomery on Azure FaaS Costs

"A Microsoft customer regularly invokes 1 billion (yes, that’s with a “B”) Azure Functions per day." Total bill: $72. Read the thread for more info.

Noah Weiss on Product Management

Read Noah's awesome thread on Product Management. Then check out Heavybit's podcast Practical Product on the same subject for more insight.

OverOps on The Modern Software Delivery Supply Chain

Over the past few years, we have experienced a shift in the way we deliver applications. We are being forced to innovate faster and deliver higher quality software. In response to this, the way we approach the design and delivery of software has changed. Read OverOps' full post.

Citus 7.4: Move Fast and Reduce Technical Debt

Citus was excited to announce the latest release of their distributed database, Citus 7.4! Citus scales out PostgreSQL through sharding, replication, and query parallelization. Read the full announcement here.

Funding Announcements

Platform.sh Raises $34 Million to Simplify Cloud Deployment

French startup Platform.sh has raised a $34 million funding round. The company wants to help you manage your cloud infrastructure by handling the most tedious part of the job.

Adyen confirms an IPO in Amsterdam, Valuing the Payments Giant at $7B-$11B

The floodgates are definitely open for IPOs in the tech world right now, and the latest is coming out of Europe. Adyen, a company that powers payments for large and smaller e-commerce merchants and others, has said that it plans to publicly list on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange.

Gatsby Gets Commercial Backing

GatsbyJS is a React-based SSG that first debuted in 2015. Gatsby upended the SSG ecosystem by combining best-practice front-end development techniques with dynamic data integrations via a rich set of plugins, queried at compile-time.

GUN Raises More Than $1.5M for its Decentralized Database System

GUN is an open-source decentralized database service that allows developers to build fast peer-to-peer applications that will work, even when their users are offline.

From The Heavybit Library

Sales Ops Panel: Building Early Stage Sales Teams

In this Heavybit sales panel, Jeff Burkland of Burkland Associates joins experts Brad Gyger of Heroku, Sarah Arcoleo of Rainforest, and Whalr's Mitch Morando to discuss when to start hiring, how to comp salespeople, and why data can help build better teams. Read More

Venture Confidential Ep. #17, Feat. Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures

In episode 17 of Venture Confidential, Manu Kumar stops by the Heavybit studio to talk about how he started a micro VC called K9 Ventures and why he chooses to invest in and help grow early stage companies.