DevToolsDigest: Issue #67

The Week in Developer Tools

Microsoft Joins the OpenCensus Project

Microsoft was happy to announce that they're joining the open source OpenCensus project, originally initiated and shepherded by Google, and they are excited to help it achieve the goal of “a single distribution of libraries for metrics and distributed tracing with minimal overhead.”

Jake Archibald: In The Loop from JSConf.Asia 2018

This talk looks at the browser's event loop, the thing that orchestrates the main thread of the browser, which includes JavaScript, events, and rendering. Look at the difference between tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, and where events land.

Node.js Creator Blasts Node.js, Offers a Secure TypeScript-Based Alternative

Like Dr. Frankenstein aghast at the monster he’d built, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl voiced some deep misgivings about his server-side JavaScript runtime engine at the JSConf.EU conference earlier this week in Germany.

Netlify's Phil Hawksworth on Headless CMSes

"When we try to design a product capable of doing everything for everyone, we often find ourselves with a product so complex, that nobody can use it for anything."

How to Write Your First Serverless Component

The open-source Serverless Components project makes it easy for anyone to author their own application components. But what if you want to try building a brand new reusable component of your own?

Re-Imagining Timekit : A Simpler Way to Create Booking Experiences

This spring Timekit rolled out new features that made their APIs the most obvious choice for businesses when building their booking experiences — a scalable alternative to build something from scratch. They also promised that a new developer friendly version of Timekit Projects was on its way. Well, now it’s here and they are excited to share it with you.

EC2 Compute Instance Family Lineage

Whilst the EC2 Instance History blog post by Jeff Barr give a good starting point about instance history it misses some important parts. Check out this downloadable content showing the lineage of all AWS instance families.

Deploy Node.js Apps to App Engine Standard Environments

Developers love Google App Engine’s zero-config deployments, zero server management and auto-scaling capabilities. Google Cloud's goal is to help users be more productive by supporting more popular programming languages. Starting this week, you can now deploy your Node.js 8 applications to App Engine standard environment. 

Industry Research

Introducing Redpoint’s Software Testing Landscape

Software testing is a large and growing market. It is experiencing Devopsification including increasing automation, expediting time to value, shifting left and right, testing APIs, and streamlining team structures. In this landscape, Redpoint categorizes ~170 offerings in the space to highlight key players and to clarify how solutions interoperate

The Blockbuster Software M&A Market of 2018

2018 is a blockbuster year for software M&A multiples. The prices companies fetch relative to their revenues surpass any of those in the past 7 years. Billion-dollar plus acquisitions in 2018 have commanded a median 17.7x trailing enterprise value to revenue multiple. Nothing in the past seven years is close. In fact, there is not a single acquisition in that range.

Do VCs Really Add Value? Founders Say Sometimes

Henri Deshays at Newfund and Carl Fritjofsson set out to better understand the delicate relationship between VCs and entrepreneurs. Do VCs really add value? What do founders consider as investor value add? And how do founders evaluate their investor when they choose whom to raise capital from?

Venture Announcements

Splunk Agrees to Acquire VictorOps

VictorOps has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Splunk. Upon close, VictorOps will join Splunk’s IT Markets group and together will provide on-call technical staff an analytics and AI-driven approach for addressing the incident lifecycle, from monitoring to response to incident management to continuous learning and improvement.

Adyen’s IPO Starts Strong as Stock Soars 70%

Netherlands-based Adyen’s IPO got an enthusiastic reception from investors today, as its stock surged 70 percent on the first day of trading.

Filings Indicate True Ventures Aims To Raise $650 Million Across Two New Venture Funds

The Silicon Valley venture firm – which invested in the likes of Fitbit (IPO), Ring (acquired by Amazon for a cool $1 billion), Blue Bottle Coffee (acquired by Nestle), and many others – filed paperwork with the SEC late Wednesday afternoon for two new funds.

From The Heavybit Archive

Making Performance A Design Consideration

In her Speaker Series presentation, Chelsea Otakan explains how designers, not just engineers, can create a user experience that keeps people engaged and learning.