DevToolsDigest: Issue #81

This week's digest includes news and resources from Microsoft, Dropbox, LaunchDarkly, Slack, Stripe, Cloudflare, Y Combinator, and more.

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SEP 28, 2018

7 MIN

The Week in Developer Tools

Introducing the YubiKey 5 Series with New NFC and FIDO2 Passwordless Features

Yubico announced the availability of its new YubiKey 5 Series, the industry’s first set of multi-protocol security keys to support FIDO2 / WebAuthn for the future of passwordless logins.

Linkerd 2.0: Service Ops for You and Me

Linkerd 2.0 is a composable service sidecar built with the Unix philosophy in mind. That is, it doesn’t aim to do everything and more but it’s really good at what it’s doing: instant observability into and troubleshooting of your containerized microservices.

Microsoft: Announcing TypeScript 3.1

When you write TypeScript code, you can use a tool like the TypeScript compiler to remove type-specific constructs, and rewrite any newer ECMAScript code to something that older browsers & runtimes can understand.

Upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2

In total, the project took a year and a half to upgrade from Rails 3.2 to Rails 5.2. Along the way GitHub took time to clean up technical debt and improve the overall codebase while doing the upgrade.

Architecture of Nautilus, the New Dropbox Search Engine

Over the last few months, the Search Infrastructure engineering team at Dropbox has been busy releasing a new full-text search engine called Nautilus, as a replacement for their previous search engine.

Industry Research

How Do You Explain the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Cloud Security?

With the enormous attack surface of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, why aren't there more security problems? Data breaches and cyber attacks occur daily. How do you explain the unreasonable effectiveness of cloud security?

How to Easily Boost the Delivery of Static Websites in AWS

If you are looking to begin your AWS journey but feel lost on where to start, consider checking out this course. It focuses on hosting, securing, and deploying static websites on AWS.

Designing for Failure to Avoid Disaster

When evaluating a service like LaunchDarkly, you may have questions about how that service will behave under worst-case scenarios. At LaunchDarkly, this is something they've thought about—failure and worst-case possibilities.

Why Test Automation is More Expensive Than You Think

Test automation can be an effective piece of the QA strategy puzzle for any team looking to optimize their testing process. But contrary to popular belief, test automation is not a magical solution to achieving cheap, lightning-fast, effortless QA results.

A History Lesson on SQL Joins (in Postgres)

SQL may be the lingua franca for relational databases—but like many languages, SQL is in a state of constant evolution. The first releases of SQL didn’t even have a notation for joins. At the time, SQL only supported inner joins.

Venture Announcements

Payment Startup Stripe Is Now a $20 Billion Company

Stripe has just closed a $245 million funding round that ups its value from $9 billion to $20 billion. Several large new customers have also been listed on Stripe's website, including Alphabet Inc.'s Google, and Uber Technologies Inc.

Y Combinator Has Changed

As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. This is a valid line of questioning – clearly much has changed about YC over 13 years. Now they have new leadership, larger batch sizes, a growth fund, and a series A program.

Y Combinator: New Standard Deal

YC is changing the standard deal by increasing their investment from $120K to $150K. The $150K investment for 7% will be made on a post-money cap safe. They believe the post-money safe is simpler, making ownership and dilution easier to understand.

Our Investment in Gremlin: Leveraging Chaos to Create Resilient Systems

Redpoint recently announced a parternship with Kolton and Matt, the founders of Gremlin, who understand the challenges of operating colossal webscale systems. To achieve ever greater uptime during their time at Amazon, Salesforce, and Netflix, they leveraged chaos engineering.

Slack Acquires Astro to Help Email and Channels Work Together

The team behind the popular email client and Slack app will make it simpler for customers to transition important conversations from email into Slack.

Cloudflare Partners with Microsoft and Others to Reduce Bandwidth Costs

The overall idea behind the Bandwidth Alliance is that customers who use both Cloudflare and a cloud provider that’s part of this alliance will get a significant discount on their egress traffic or won’t have to pay for it at all.

Fog Creek is Now Glitch!

Fog Creek has been renamed to Glitch, Inc. to represent their single-minded focus on Glitch. Glitch has won the hearts of developers around the world who now feel that coding with other tools feels a lot more lonely and less productive.

From The Heavybit Library

Featured Event: DevGuild: Enterprise-Ready Products

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