DevToolsDigest: Issue #85

The Week in Developer Tools

Particle Mesh is Shipping: Everything You Need to Know

All of the new development kits come supercharged with local mesh networking out of the box, benefit from Particle’s growing ecosystem of tools for IoT developers and administrators, and improve on the previous generation of hardware products in almost every way imaginable.

Convox: 12 Factor Apps Revisited

12 factor has continued to be the dominant philosophy for building scalable, secure, and maintainable web applications. It has even been applied to the rising popularity of serverless applications. It’s time to revisit the principles of 12 factor apps and how you can follow them when creating containerized applications.

LaunchDarkly: Bulk Invites for Team Members

This new bulk invite feature allows your team to implement flagging as a best practice by delegating responsibility to the right people on your team. If your organization has custom roles, you can assign team members to the correct role right off the bat.

The Most Important Non-Programming Skills for Programmers

These skills help so much with both writing code and being a good co-worker. They are so much more important than knowing a specific language, library, or framework and they go far even outside of tech.

MongoDB's Server Side Public License is Likely Unenforceable

MongoDB, Inc changed the license of its widely-used database software to the "Server Side Public License" or SSPL. They also submitted the SSPL for review by the Open Source Initiative, where it is under active discussion.

Open Sourcing Subzero: Square’s Bitcoin Cold Storage Solution

Since launching Bitcoin support, Square developed a robust approach to Bitcoin cold storage, and recognize the importance of sharing the work with the community. As a result, they're open-sourcing the documentation, code, and tools for “Subzero,” their HSM-backed solution for protecting Square’s Bitcoin holdings.

WebAssembly's Post-MVP Future: A Cartoon Skill Tree

The WebAssembly community group is really committed to backwards compatibility. This means that the WebAssembly that you create today will continue working on browsers into the future. But that doesn’t mean that WebAssembly is feature complete.

GitHub: October 21 Incident Report

On Sunday October 21, multiple services on GitHub.com were affected by a network partition and subsequent database failure resulting in inconsistent information being presented on the website.

Industry Research

Jeremy Daly: What 15 Minute Lambda Functions Tells Us About the Future of Serverless

AWS recently announced 15 minute Lambda functions along with their new "Applications" menu. While these may seem like incremental improvements to the casual observer, they actually give us an interesting glimpse into the future of serverless computing.

How Cloud Computing Changed Venture Capital

The introduction of cloud computing services in the mid 2000s allowed Internet and web-based startups to avoid large initial capital expenditures and instead “rent” hardware space and other services in small increments, scaling up as demand grew. Cloud computing made the early ‘experiments’ for these firms significantly cheaper.

Changing the Status Quo: How to Create a Culture of Accountability in Your Org

Shifting to a software-driven mentality has caused a lot of challenges as net new competition and pace of innovation creates pressure and stress on leadership, line of business, and IT organizations. How do you foster collaboration between Dev and Ops at your company?

Playing Mortal Kombat with TensorFlow.js

In this blog post, Minko Gechev develops a supervised deep learning model for a posture classification algorithm using TensorFlow.js and MobileNet. By the end of the article, you too will be able to build a model that can classify images based on whether the user is punching, kicking, or doing neither.

Venture Announcements

Why Citus Data is Donating 1% Equity to PostgreSQL Organizations

Postgres is not only the world’s most advanced open source relational database. It is also the world’s only independent database. No single company backs or represents the Postgres project. This is the first time a company has donated 1% of its equity to support the mission of an open source foundation.

LaunchDarkly Celebrates 500th Customer, 3x Revenue Growth, and Inclusion in Forbes 2018 Rising Stars

LaunchDarkly, the leading Feature Management company, announced over 500 businesses are now using its platform to build software applications and release new features faster, with less risk. LaunchDarkly’s inclusion in the Forbes 2018 Rising Star further validates feature management’s impact on software delivery.

Repl.it Raises $4.5M, Announces A Million Monthly Active Users

Repl.it announced that they've raised a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen championing the deal. Not only that, they've shipped 250,000 websites/apps since launching in March and had a million users last month. 

GitHub is Now Officially Part of the Microsoft Family of Companies

The Microsoft acquistion of GitHub is complete. Monday will be Nat Friedman's first day as CEO but GitHub will continue to operate independently as a community, platform, and business. 

From The Heavybit Archive

To Be Continuous Ep. #46, Microsoft Acquires GitHub

With the announcement from Microsoft and GitHub, revisit this episode of To Be Continuous. Paul and Edith discuss Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. Is it a good thing? What will be the impact of such a massive deal on the companies and developers in the devtools space?

Serverless Meetup with Cloudflare

On September 11th, 2018, Heavybit member Serverless Inc. hosted the Serverless user meetup. The event was co-hosted by Cloudflare to highlight their latest serverless offering Cloudflare Workers. In these videos, learn directly from the engineers and product managers who are building the future of serverless at Cloudflare.