DevToolsDigest: Issue #76

The Week in Developer Tools

Observerless: The Hottest New Thing in Monitoring You're Already Doing

There’s been a revolution in the cloud computing space. In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for four years, it’s the concept of Functions as a Service. Often referred to as “serverless,” it’s equally often interrupted by some sad sack insisting that “Serverless runs on servers!”

The Must Have Metrics Any DevOps and SRE Manager Should Measure

DevOps and SREs have dashboards to monitor services and product performance, and now it’s time to understand how to measure these teams’ performance as well.

Launched: Enhanced Audit Log Entries

Creating a feature flag is just the start of using feature flags throughout your application. To give you more visible insight into how your flags change over time, LaunchDarkly has released enhanced audit log entries for your flags. 

Intel Publishes Microcode Security Patches, No Benchmarking Or Comparison Allowed!

The security fixes are known to significantly slow down Intel processors, which won’t just disappoint customers and reduce the public regard of Intel, it will probably lead to lawsuits (if it hasn’t already).

Updated Publishing Flow in ReadMe

ReadMe recently released an improved publishing flow. Now when creating new docs, blog posts, or custom pages they will be unlisted by default. This allows everything to be edited until it’s perfect, without any risk of something being public when it shouldn’t be.

Need to Node: Volume 19

The past few weeks have had some interesting activity while NodeSource prepared for the release of Node.js v10 LTS, while juggling security releases, dependency updates, and an upcoming Foundation-sponsored event. Check out some of what’s happened in the Node.js GitHub organization over the past week.

Importing Projects via the API

Snyk just released a shiny new API endpoint that will let you import your repositories, projects, functions, and apps so that they are monitored for vulnerabilities.

Industry Research

Serverless Best Practices

Within the serverless community there've been debates over the best practices for many years, but there are a few that have been relatively accepted for most of that time.

How Jacuzzi Launched Smart Hot Tubs in 6 Months

When you think about hot tubs, you may think about relaxation, comfort, or recovery. This is the main allure of owning a hot tub, and you wouldn’t think there is much business to innovate or change hot tub relaxation. However, when Jacuzzi thinks about hot tubs, they only think about ways to innovate hot tub relaxation.

3 Things the Software Industry Can Learn from Ikea's Quality Processes

Whether you’re getting a coffee table, a rug, or an outdoor patio set named after a Scandinavian island, you can expect the same level of quality from IKEA products no matter where in the world you buy them. Explore three ways IKEA ensures product quality, and how software testing teams can apply those practices to their QA processes.

The Marketing “Decafail:" Ten Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make

At Reify, their list of clients is growing, they’re seeing the inner workings of more software companies, and they’re starting to notice some patterns. Since people ask them all the time how to be better at marketing, Reify put together a list of problems to avoid today to make your tomorrow more certain. 

It’s Time for the Open Source Community to Get Real

The open source community needs to take a deep breath and think about the realities of OSS development. The work isn’t free and it costs people’s time, effort, and passion.

Venture Announcements

Slack's Feverish Fundraising Continues as Valuation Tops $7 Billion

San Francisco-based workplace collaboration platform Slack has soared in market value to $7.1 billion; up $2 billion in less than a year, following a $427 million Series H funding round announced recently.

Nylas Scores $16M Series B to Expand Email API Tool

Nylas, a startup that helps developers integrate email content into applications via an API, announced a $16 million Series B recently led by Spark Capital.

From The Heavybit Library

Rainforest QA: Changing The Way We Do QA

When Fred and his co-founder and CTO Russell Smith joined Heavybit, they started with just 4 employees. Under Fred’s leadership, Rainforest QA has grown to 100+ employees, more than 10xed revenue, and continues to double average contract value year over year.