DevToolsDigest: Issue #68

The Week in Developer Tools

After 20 Years of Salesforce, What Marc Benioff Got Right and Wrong About the Cloud

As we enter the twentieth year of Salesforce, there’s an interesting opportunity to reflect back on the change that Marc Benioff created with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for enterprise software with his launch of Salesforce.com.

Fun with SQL: Functions in Postgres

There are in fact several hundred built-in functions in PostgreSQL. And when needed, you can also create your own user defined functions (UDFs), if you need something custom. Today we’re going to walk through just a small sampling of SQL functions that can be extremely handy in PostgreSQL.

Former Citrix Chief Mark Templeton Takes Over at Cloud Start-up DigitalOcean

Former Citrix CEO Mark Templeton has a new job. He's taking over as chief of DigitalOcean, a trendy start-up that prioritizes developers and teams as it offers cloud infrastructure for hosting applications.

Snyk + Jira

Over the past few months, Snyk has been working closely with their customers who use Snyk alongside various issue trackers as a way of managing their vulnerability remediation process. This week they launched a Jira integration for all their Pro and Enterprise plan customers.

Introducing Confluent Hub

Confluent announced the launch of Confluent Hub, a place for the Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform community to come together and share the components the community needs to build better streaming data pipelines and event-driven applications.

Platform Moats

Your superior technology does not matter as much as you think.

Docker Previews Application Management Features for Developers Working Across Multiple Clouds

At its annual user conference, Docker announced that it is preparing a series of new features to reduce complexity for developers using its container-based application system.

React Native at Airbnb

In 2016, Airbnb took a big bet on React Native. Two years later, they're ready to share their experience with the world and show what’s next.

Launched: Put a Tag on It

Tags are a useful way of grouping flags together, as well as leveraging the power of custom roles and webhooks. Many LaunchDarkly teams add an “ops” tag to flags as a way of quickly assigning permission and providing visibility to particular flags. Learn more in this blog post.

Industry Research

AI Researchers Allege That Machine Learning is Alchemy

Ali Rahimi, a researcher in artificial intelligence (AI) at Google, took a swipe at his field last December—and received a 40-second ovation for it. Speaking at an AI conference, Rahimi charged that machine learning algorithms, in which computers learn through trial and error, have become a form of "alchemy."

#1: The $100B+ Commercial OSS Company Index (COSSCI)

Joseph Jacks was inspired to open source a spreadsheet he had been maintaining — entitled “commercial open source software company index”. Read about his thinking behind the data, and what's next for the COSSCI.

Venture Announcements

Nginx Raises $43M From Goldman Sachs

Nginx, the company based on the open source web server of the same name, has raised $43m in a series C fundraising round led by GS Growth, a growth equity platform within Goldman Sachs.

Elastic Files To IPO

Elastic, the creator of a data search software that companies buy in order to scan massive documents, data sets and visualizations, has confidentially filed to go public in what will be an initial public offering at a multi-billion dollar valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.

Pulumi Wants to Let You Manage Your Infrastructure With Code

Pulumi, a Seattle-based startup that came out of stealth this week, wants to make it easier for developers and ops team to define their infrastructure by writing code. Instead of using a cloud-specific configuration language, the service’s tools allow developers to define the infrastructure for their applications in the same programming languages they already use for the applications.

Microsoft to Acquire Machine Learning Startup Bonsai

Microsoft is adding more firepower to its artificial intelligence arm. The tech giant has agreed to acquire Bonsai, a San Francisco-based startup that helps enterprise companies add machine learning and AI capabilities into their existing operations.

From The Heavybit Library

O11ycast | Ep. #1, Monitoring vs. Observability

In episode one of O11ycast, Merian Ventures' Rachel Chalmers and Honeycomb.io's Charity Majors dive into a few ways observability can drive fundamental changes in the way we approach software development.

The Secure Developer | Ep. #18, Collaborative Security with HackerOne's Marten Mickos

In episode 18 of The Secure Developer, Guy meets with Marten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne, a platform for vulnerability coordination and a bug bounty program that helps developers test and build more secure systems.