DevToolsDigest: Issue #83

The Week in Developer Tools

Disaster Recovery Considerations in AWS

AWS observed what appeared to be unrelated incidents in us-west-2 (Oregon) and eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) that gave a number of AWS customers a run for their money as provisioning times of several core services rose to unacceptable levels.

Building Mobile and Web Apps with AWS Amplify and the Serverless Framework

There has always been a bit of a problem between deploying your backend and then integrating that same backend with your front end code. The traditional approach is to create a configuration file for the purpose. But how?

How to Show Groovy and Kotlin DSL Samples Side-by-Side

Though there aren’t many ways to make README pages interactive, you can use the <details> and <summary> HTML elements within Markdown or Asciidoc to achieve a bit of interactivity yet avoid the verbosity of having multiple subsequent samples in view.

LaunchDarkly: In Case of Emergency, Do Not Break

Thinking about failure states is a type of testing and an essential part of making sure your application will behave in the way you expect it to, even in the face of unknown-unknown failure states.

Jeff Dickey: 12 Factor CLI Apps

CLIs are a fantastic way to build products. Unlike web applications, they take a small fraction of the time to build and are much more powerful. With CLIs, you can easily mash-up multiple tools together yourself to perform advanced tasks.

Industry Research

Pivotal Partner Days: A Summary by an OverOps Solution Engineer

OverOps' customers seem to all be thinking about how DevOps and SREs teams can help mediate the battle between reliability and innovation. One method is to create symmetry between the prod and pre-prod environments.

Software Startup InVision Has No Physical HQ and All 700 Employees Work Remotely

InVision is a 7-year-old software company that has no physical headquarters and whose employees work everywhere from Nigeria to Argentina. "It's about results, not where your IP address is."

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

For most of the world, the terms "Silicon Valley" and "startup" are synonymous. Indeed, Silicon Valley is home to a disproportionate number of companies that have grown from garage startups into global giants. But what is the secret to these startups' extraordinary success?

Development Flow in Serverless Environment from the Trenches

Defining a development workflow is an art, not a science. Each development team has its own quirks and preferred way of working. But the core values of using serverless tools and testing in the cloud is a sensible default that should be shared among all serverless developers.

CPDD: Critical Path Driven Development

CPDD is a tool that closes knowledge gaps more than any other practice in the field yet we don’t talk about it. We are still in the dark ages when it comes to maintaining systems.

Venture Announcements

Las Olas VC: Our Investment in IOPipe

While serverless provides massive advantages, there’s insufficient tooling, which creates adoption challenges. IOPipe solves most of those problems by providing an application performance management platform purpose-built for server-less.

Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Rebel

With Rebel’s Mail and API solutions, brands turn emails into an extension of their website or app - collecting data, removing friction from the conversion process, and enhancing the customer experience. Rebel will enhance the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and fundamentally change the way people interact with email.

Meet the Start-Up That Powers Venmo, Robinhood and Other Big Apps

Rambler is long gone but its underlying technology has since become a household name among fintech developers. That technology, Plaid's APIs, has attracted investments from the venture arms of Goldman Sachs, Citi and American Express, and some say, has helped accelerate the growth of the payment sector over the past five years.

Oracle Names 6 High-Profile Austin Startups to Its U.S. Global Startup Hub

Oracle’s accelerator officially launched in June, offering free Oracle Cloud credits and access to investors and customers at a massive scale. It has offices in Bangalore, Bristol, Delhi, Mumbai, Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Tel Aviv. But this is the first in the U.S.

​Microsoft Open-Sources Its Patent Portfolio

The Open Invention Network is the largest patent non-aggression community in history and represents a core set of open-source intellectual-property values. By joining the OIN, Microsoft is offering its entire patent portfolio to all of the open-source patent consortium's members.

From The Heavybit Library

Sales Hiring Strategy with Greylock Partners & TalentBin

Founding Sales author and Atrium HQ co-founder Pete Kazanjy joins Dan Portillo, Talent Partner at Greylock Ventures, to explain when and how to build a successful sales team.

EnterpriseReady Ep. #1, Delivering Software That Enterprises Love with Chef's Adam Jacob

In this episode Grant interviews Adam Jacob, founder and CTO of Chef. Adam has been building Chef for over 10 years and during that time he has learned a LOT about how to deliver software that enterprises love.