DevToolsDigest: November 16th, 2018
This week's digest includes news and resources from PagerDuty, Honeycomb, Cloudflare, Airtable, Rookout, GitLab, Zapier, and more.

The Week in Developer Tools
Cloudflare has a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike other cloud computing platforms, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. Is that the future of serverless and cloud computing?
The writable files API is designed to increase interoperability of web applications with native applications, making it possible for users to choose files or directories that a web app can interact with on the native file system, and without having to use a native wrapper
The JavaScript Handbook is a 171-page ebook by Flavio Copes. The ebook is free but you can also take a look at the table of contents or preview the first 30 pages. 
AWS provides an API for everything! This includes the Pricing API to find out how much you can spend via their other APIs. This API can be difficult to use to answer questions like: How much does an EC2 instance cost?
Though it’s missing some of the features which will be available when it’s completed, today represents a very capable software forge which is already serving the needs of many projects in the free & open source software community.
How the bfloat16 number format, popular in machine learning, compares to other 16-bit numbers in terms of range and precision.
Rookout, a startup that offers debugging tools for applications that run on modern container and serverless platforms, is launching a new feature that brings the equivalent of breakpoints to Kubernetes. 
Industry Research
Heatmaps are a vital tool for software owners: if you’re going to look at a lot of data, then you need to be able to summarize it without losing detail. Unfortunately, the word hasn’t spread as widely as it could yet.
There's a big difference between “programming” and working as a professional software engineer.
It's a classic story: Tech company goes to Silicon Valley incubator, emerges with a plan, and grows explosively. The only exception is that few of GitLab's employees actually live in the Bay Area.
Just as the legal industry now has legal search and discovery to find documents faster, eliminate down time, and be more productive, there is opportunity for a new generation of enterprise search & discovery, collaboration and knowledge management tools, that converge and combined with machine-learning capabilities, will create a new layer of team intelligence.
Zapier is an app integration and automation platform that lets users (primarily SMBs) set-up triggered actions and workflows between different applications. They started in 2011 and have only raised $1.3M in venture funding, primarily bootstrapping their way to $35M ARR. Currently they have over 1,000 apps on their platform.
It is easy to see why the average person might believe that a field like computer science, or a profession like software engineering, completely reinvents itself every few years. Of course, the amazing thing is how little actually changes.
Venture Announcements
Airtable, which uses a simple interface built on spreadsheets and other tools familiar to knowledge workers as a frontend to produce apps and other web-based experiences, has raised $100 million in funding to expand its business with more talent and offices outside the US.
Software company Apptio Inc announced it agreed to be bought by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for $1.94 billion in cash, two years after going public.
From The Heavybit Library
Navigating Enterprise Needs
In this session, CTOs Kimber Lockhart from One Medical, Ralph Gootee from PlanGrid, and Valentino Volonghi from AdRoll, discuss the frameworks they use to diligence technical products, the core enterprise features they need to satisfy their risk profiles, and the nuances of selling into their unique industries and businesses.
Practical Product Ep. #16, Building and Leveraging Product Marketplaces
In episode 16 of Practical Product, Craig and Rimas are joined by Connie Kwan to walk through the process of buying and selling products on marketplaces.

The latest news, product updates, jobs, and discussions in the developer tools industry. Brought to you by Heavybit.
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