DevToolsDigest: Issue #86

The Week in Developer Tools

Envoy and gRPC-Web: A Fresh New Alternative to REST

gRPC-Web is a JavaScript client library that enables web applications to interact with backend gRPC services using Envoy instead of a custom HTTP server as an intermediary. Last week, the gRPC team announced the GA release of gRPC-Web on the CNCF blog after nearly two years of active development.

Admin Panel Roundup

Let’s say you need to moderate content on your platform, delete somebody’s account, or find out which of your users are most active. An admin panel is where you’d do it! There are a few off the shelf options for building admin interfaces and they're all good at specific things but how do you decide between them?

Materialized Views vs. Rollup Tables in Postgres

Materialized views are a very simple and straight forward approach. Their ease of use makes them a good choice for something quick and easy. But for larger data sets and databases that have more active workloads only processing net new data from your last rollup can be a more efficient use or resources.

Vue Dark Mode: A Minimalist Dark Design System for Vue.js

Vue.js is an open-source JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. Vue Dark Mode provides based-components and customized plugins designed for the insomniacs who enjoy dark interfaces.

Announcing Managed CockroachDB: The Geo-Distributed Database as a Service

Managed CockroachDB is cloud agnostic and available at launch on both AWS and GCP. The goal is simple: allow your development team to focus on building highly scalable applications without worrying about infrastructure operations.

Industry Research

What To Do When QA Bottlenecks Hinder Deployment Velocity

There are a number of reasons that can cause QA to block deployment. While it can be easy to assume that the QA team simply needs to test faster, the root cause of a lagging QA process is usually much more than that.

Testing 101: Introduction to Testing

It feels like there is a lot of conflicting advice out there, and that's because there is. Testing is opinionated, more-so than any other software engineering discipline. Folks are always arguing about what to test, how to test, and especially when to test.

A Tour of the Top 10 Algorithms for Machine Learning Newbies

In machine learning, there’s something called the “No Free Lunch” theorem. In a nutshell, it states that no one algorithm works best for every problem, and it’s especially relevant for supervised learning (i.e. predictive modeling).

Why Your Server Monitoring (Still) Sucks

Monitoring impacts the entire company, and often in different ways. By the time you find yourself in a conversation with executives to request an investment in monitoring, you will be able to speak their language. Go forth and fix your monitoring.

The Red Flags and Magic Numbers That Investors Look for in Your Startup's Metrics

Growing startups and evaluating startups share common skills. The same skills needed to grow new products can be used both to evaluate new startups to invest in, and once invested, to help them grow. 

Corey Quinn: CloudWatch is of the Devil, but I Must Use It

CloudWatch keeps all of your metrics. It keeps your logs. It lets you build custom dashboards to view your metrics all in one place. The building blocks of a great service are already here—it's the expression of that utility that falls short, sometimes drastically.

The Top 100 Java Libraries in 2018

Java went through some changes over the last few months, starting with the move towards a 6 month release cycle. Only OpenJDK builds will be freely accessible, while Java SE 8 public updates will require a commercial license for business, commercial or production use. The changes in Java affect developers and it shows in the shift in popularity of certain libraries.

Why Jupyter is Data Scientists’ Computational Notebook of Choice

Jupyter is a free, open-source, interactive web tool known as a computational notebook, which researchers can use to combine software code, computational output, explanatory text and multimedia resources in a single document. Computational notebooks have been around for decades, but Jupyter in particular has exploded in popularity over the past couple of years.

Venture Announcements

IBM Acquires Red Hat, What This Means for Open Source Software

In their published remarks, IBM and Red Hat position the acquisition as a move for IBM to become the largest infrastructure provider for the hybrid cloud, angling for IBM to be the primary supplier to public clouds with their intention to develop deeper partnerships with vendors like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

HashiCorp Raises $100 Million to Help Enterprises Adopt Multi-Cloud

 The company plans to focus investment on its open source and commercial product development; increased hiring in global go-to-market functions; and its customer success, support, and training efforts for its worldwide customer base.

Rockset Launches Out of Stealth with $21.5M Investment

Rockset announced $21.5M in previous funding and the launch of its new data platform that is designed to simplify much of the processing to get to querying and application building faster.

From The Heavybit Library

JAMstack Radio Ep. #33, The Knative Project with IBM Cloud Platform's Jason McGee

In episode 33 of JAMstack Radio, Brian speaks with Jason McGee, IBM Fellow and VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform, to see how Knative is helping developers build and deploy serverless projects.

The Secure Developer Ep. #22, Authentication with Yubico's Stina Ehrensvärd

In episode 22 of The Secure Developer, Guy meets with Stina Ehrensvrd, founder and CEO of Yubico, to explore how hardware solutions like YubiKey can be an effective approach to authentication and security.

Practical Product Ep. #14, Roadmaps and Product Direction

In episode 14 of Practical Product, Craig and Rimas look at the differences between following a product roadmap and framing a strategy around product direction and user engagement.

Venture Confidential Ep. #22, Feat. Dan Scholnick of Trinity Ventures

In episode 22 of Venture Confidential, Dan Scholnick, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses how his past experience as a two time entrepreneur helps him determine which promising companies and charismatic entrepreneurs to invest in as well as what sets Trinity Ventures apart from other funds.

To Be Continuous Ep. #50, Marketing an Open Source Project

In episode 50 of To Be Continuous, Edith and Paul look at how marketing plays a role in open source and how creators can turn a vision into a successful developer community.