1. DevToolsDigest
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DevToolsDigest: Issue #6

Take five and have a look at this week’s Dev Tools Digest. This edition touches on data management, technical debt and more with selected readings from around the developer community.

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Heavybit's DevToolsDigest is a weekly curated selection of the best resources, product updates, jobs, and discussions in the developer tools industry.

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    Francisco Fisher
4 MIN

Take five and have a look at this week’s Dev Tools Digest. This edition touches on data management, technical debt and more with selected readings from around the developer community.

Past, Present, Future

The 2015 Turing Award was awarded this week to Whitfield Diffie, formerly of Sun Microsystems, and Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, for their contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman’s 1976 paper, “New Directions in Cryptography,” laid the foundation for online security standards used today.

Mozilla announces its next move in the IoT sphere relating to modular, smart home technology with project names that include: Link, Sensor Web, Smart Home, and Vaani. Mozilla has made a call for the developer community to help test and give feedback on these projects as they grow.

Show Me the Data

Keen IO lays out how to maintain consistent API performance as described on the company’s blog. In order to meet the demand for queries, Keen IO uses a software stack built on Apache Storm. In the post, author and Keen IO backend developer Manu Mahajan describes how his team was able to consistently lower query response times and use Storm’s queuing capabilities more efficiently.

The Treasure Data blog offers an article with tips on using XML imports in place of JSON. While the author says most data ingestion frameworks use JSON, there are scenarios where XML is advantageous, as with team data sharing. This is where a setup using Embulk and Treasure Data comes into play to be part of a user’s own XML ingestion toolchain.

Dealing With Technical Debt

PagerDuty, an incident management service, offers a framework for handling technical debt as laid out in a recent post. How do you approach your built-in coding issues? PagerDuty’s recommended game plan includes first laying out a definition of technical debt specific to your product and then mapping out known problem areas in the source code. Finally, have procedures in place for logging and resolving these issues at the appropriate time and in a consistent way.

LaunchDarkly offers feature flagging for testing and dynamic delivery. An article published this week goes into the process of mitigating technical debt on an enterprise scale using LaunchDarkly’s feature flagging platform. Some flagging issues to avoid include feature flag use inconsistencies, user management confusion and flag disorganization once at scale.

New From Heavybit

The Road To Growth podcast delivers a new installment this week as Runscope sales engineer Yaron Sadka hosts Andrew O’Neal, Head of Growth at Clearbit. Their discussion focuses on leveraging sales data and the importance of product usability for both the developer and non-developer sides of the equation.

Heavybit hosted the SF Marketing to Devs meetup last month that featured a panel of developer advocates and leaders from companies including Keen IOCouchbaseGithubDocker and New Relic. Keen IO’s VP of Developer Advocacy Justin Johnson moderated the event and gives additional thoughts in a Heavybit Blog post that includes video from the event.

For more developer-based news and content, check back with the Heavybit blog, or browse Heavybit’s Library for in-depth talks from industry leaders on how to grow your company. Is there some news, events or developer-related content you’d like to see on the next Heavybit Dev Tools Digest? Contact us, we’d love to hear from you.