DevToolsDigest: Issue #96

The Week in Developer Tools

SortSupport: Sorting in Postgres at Speed

Most often, there’s a trade off involved in optimizing software. The cost of better performance is the opportunity cost of the time that it took to write the optimization, and the additional cost of maintenance for code that becomes more complex and more difficult to understand.

What is GitOps and Why You Should Know About It

To increase automation and efficiency, some companies now are bypassing dashboards and instead preferring to manage these products directly from within their code base. This trend has been coined “GitOps” or “Git Centric”, as increasingly products are being codified and deployed within Git environments.

Tips for Running Free Dynos on Heroku in 2019

Heroku has changed how they handle free dynos multiple times over the years, so you’d be excused for being a little lost about the current state of things. The bottom line is that while it’s possible to run a 24/7 production app on a free Heroku dyno, it comes with some caveats.

JAMstack Cheatsheet

JAMstack is revolutionising the way we think about workflow by providing a simpler developer experience, better performance, lower cost and greater scalability. This simple guide will help you understand why it exists and how to get started.

Open Sourcing ClusterFuzz

Fuzzing is an automated method for detecting bugs in software that works by feeding unexpected inputs to a target program. It is effective at finding memory corruption bugs, which often have serious security implications. In order for fuzzing to be truly effective, it must be continuous, done at scale, and integrated into the development process of a software project.

Step By Step Guide to Developing Your Own Third-Party Django Library

Some of the most popular websites in the world were built using Python. To create a web application, you need a framework. Django is one of the most popular Python web frameworks in the world today.

Industry Research

Finding Serverless’ Hidden Costs

Every new technology comes with risks, and these must be identified and mitigated. The talk ”The Real Cost of Pay-Per-Use in Serverless” by Ran Ribenzaft at AWS Community Day Tel Aviv covers several critical aspects of the cost in serverless. 

How Long Will a 64 Bit Transaction-ID Last in PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is currently using 32 bits for the TXID, and is good for around 4 billion transactions. That will not last very long if you have a busy database, doing many writes over the day.

When AWS Autoscale Doesn’t

The premise behind autoscaling in AWS is simple: you can maximize your ability to handle load spikes and minimize costs if you automatically scale your application out based on metrics like CPU or memory utilization. Application Autoscaling is not a magic wand, however.

Postmortems Part 2: How to Adopt a Learning Culture

A successful postmortem is more than just a process—it’s based on a culture of honesty, learning, and accountability. Culture change requires management buy-in, but you can lead culture change no matter your role.

Developer Venture News

Microsoft Acquires Citus Data

Microsoft announced that it has acquired Citus Data, a company that focuses on making PostgreSQL databases faster and more scalable. Microsoft plans to work with the Citus Data team to “accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence.”

Messaging Platform Slack Says It's Filed to Go Public

Slack plans to forgo a traditional initial public offering and instead intends to sell its shares to bidders in a direct listing. While that would preclude the company from raising money by issuing new shares for sale, it would avoid some typical underwriting fees and allow current investors to sell shares without a lock-up period.

Databricks Raises $250M at a $2.75B Valuation for Its Analytics Platform

Databricks, the company founded by the original team behind the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, announced that it has raised a $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Management, Green Bay Ventures, Microsoft and NEA, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $498.5 million.

New Relic Acquires SignifAI to Bring AI to IT Operations

SignifAI's open data platform integrates with popular DevOps tools to help teams understand their operational data, such as alerts and change events, regardless of the source. With modern systems that include microservice architectures, containers and serverless technologies, it can be difficult to make sense of alerts and prioritize them. SignifAI helps simplify that process, and it offers root cause analysis and automated predictive insights.

From The Heavybit Library

From 0 to 1, Hiring Your First Product Manager

For any founder, particularly technical founders who are closer to the code than non-technical founders, hiring the first Product Manager is risky business. Product is a role that is central to the life-blood of the company because it is responsible for so many decisions.