DevToolsDigest: Issue #79

This week's digest includes news and resources from Microsoft, Confluent, CloudForecast, Steve Blank, Sysdig, and more.

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SEP 14, 2018

5 MIN

The Week in Developer Tools

How to Build a Cross-Platform IoT Mobile App with NativeScript and Particle

Your mobile app is how people will use your product and interface with all of the low-level technical decisions you’ve made. Don’t let it be an after-thought in your design. Here’s an example of how you can use NativeScript.

Microsoft Announces Azure DevOps Which Will Succeed Visual Studio Team Services

Microsoft announced Azure DevOps, the successor of Visual Studio Team Services and Azure DevOps Server, the successor of Team Foundation Server. The included services “span the breadth of the development lifecycle to help developers ship software faster and with higher quality.”

Data Wrangling with Apache Kafka and KSQL

KSQL, the SQL streaming engine for Apache Kafka®, puts the power of stream processing into the hands of anyone who knows SQL. It’s fun to use for exploring data in Kafka topics, but its real power comes in building stream processing applications.

Hacker News: Tools of the Trade

A comprehensive list of developer tools collected from Hacker News, AngelList, and Quora.

LaunchDarkly: Require Comments for Flag Changes and Confirmations for Flag Deletions

As teams get larger, it becomes difficult for all members to have complete context of changes made. LaunchDarkly helps organizations stay aligned and informed with optional comments when making flag changes. This feature has been so helpful that some teams have asked for the ability to make it required for certain changes.

Industry Research

How CloudForecast Saved Over $1,000 by Building with Serverless and AWS Lambda

"Get your product out fast while being cost-effective to limit the damage if your idea fails." CloudFlare tries to apply this advice to every aspect of their business, including their technical decisions.

How the Financial Times Mapped 1.3m Data Points Using Mapbox

This project had an interesting history in that it began as a downtime collaboration and was subsequently elevated to “major project” status following discussions with the FT’s companies editor and telecoms correspondent. Read more about the 5 things they learned as a team.

Steve Blank: The End of More- The Death of Moore’s Law

The world of computing is moving into new and uncharted territory. For desktop and mobile devices, the need for a “must have” upgrade won’t be for speed, but because there’s a new capability or app.

Serverless: Cold Start War

Auto-provisioning and auto-scalability are the killer features of Function-as-a-Service cloud offerings. One drawback of such dynamic provisioning is a phenomenon called "cold start." Basically, applications that haven't been used for a while take longer to startup and to handle the first request.

How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC

Every audio/video communication in Discord is multiparty. This post gives a brief overview of the different technologies Discord uses to make audio/video communications a seamless reality.

Elastic S-1 Analysis- Another Open Source Monster

Elastic commercializes open source software called the Elastic Stack, a set of different products that enable users to search and store data in many different sources and formats. This software is used for application, website, and enterprise search, application performance monitoring, and analytics for business and security data.

Venture Announcements

Sysdig’s $68.5M Series D Funding

Sysdig’s open source forensics technology & open source run-time security project have a community of millions of users. Their commercial customer base has grown to hundreds of enterprises, including many of the world’s largest financial institutions, government organizations and media, cable, and technology companies.