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This McKinsey report has some really great info on what matters in fuelling dev velocity, and the best tooling comes top. Culture, product management and talent management complete the top 4.
Hey Seattle based folks - lets meet up!
I shouldve done this way sooner, but my living and conference travel situation made it impossible to schedule anything earlier.
Tre Ammatuna
and
John William Davis
will be joining me for dinner and drinks meetup, location TBD, shout if you can make it!
I shouldve done this way sooner, but my living and conference travel situation made it impossible to schedule anything earlier.
Hey!
Want to share the good news! This community inspired me to do more public talking and I conquered my fear and applied to the conference and it was accepted (actually, it was accepted to the more field-specific conference, but there was a more famous Microsoft speaker with the same presentation so we decided to switch to another conference of this organization. Happy!😀
https://techtrain.ru/
Want to share the good news! This community inspired me to do more public talking and I conquered my fear and applied to the conference and it was accepted (actually, it was accepted to the more field-specific conference, but there was a more famous Microsoft speaker with the same presentation so we decided to switch to another conference of this organization. Happy!😀
https://techtrain.ru/
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Hey everyone, 1 month ago I posted a **rough** draft for a CFP for EmberFest (the second biggest conference for Ember).
Shawn provided me a few rounds of review on my first CFP.
In the book, Shawn mentions to submit multiple CFPs to maximize your odds.
That first CFP "Shortening the Ember Learning Curve" was rejected.
The second CFP "Understanding Ember with Design Patterns" (same doc just scroll lower) was accepted.
Now, I have less than 30 days to create 30 minutes of material while I launch a huge feature to be released before HashiConf (my company's conference). Will keep everyone posted on the progress.
Shawn provided me a few rounds of review on my first CFP.
In the book, Shawn mentions to submit multiple CFPs to maximize your odds.
That first CFP "Shortening the Ember Learning Curve" was rejected.
The second CFP "Understanding Ember with Design Patterns" (same doc just scroll lower) was accepted.
Now, I have less than 30 days to create 30 minutes of material while I launch a huge feature to be released before HashiConf (my company's conference). Will keep everyone posted on the progress.
Lauren Tan (on the React Data team) recommended this FB Eng article from 2011 on dealing with the seemingly unending cycles of dissatisfaction we have in software development:
> There's a lot of wisdom in this post, some of which I think I've subtly picked up over the years, but haven't been able to articulate well yet. I think a lot of it is why I don't feel as much frustration about never achieving ideal states as long as we're making progress.
> The hard thing I realized was that there is rarely ever an end state. Software is a living tool representing the needs and wants of people. Those change all the time. And so will software as long as we're building something that's used by a person somewhere along the chain.
> There's a lot of wisdom in this post, some of which I think I've subtly picked up over the years, but haven't been able to articulate well yet. I think a lot of it is why I don't feel as much frustration about never achieving ideal states as long as we're making progress.
> The hard thing I realized was that there is rarely ever an end state. Software is a living tool representing the needs and wants of people. Those change all the time. And so will software as long as we're building something that's used by a person somewhere along the chain.
Great (long!) interview, a founder with a lot of grit and ethics and a great story. A lot on the VC/bootstrap debate. I like this particularly because he's working in exactly the same space as what I'm building, but his solution is in one sense the opposite of mine.
Great (long!) interview, a founder with a lot of grit and ethics and a great story. A lot on the VC/bootstrap debate. I like this particularly because he's working in exactly the same space as what I'm building, but his solution is in one sense the opposite of mine.
Hi all,
I have a running series on my website that includes
- a detailed experience story of my 6-month job search last fall
- a breakdown of what worked well and what didn't
- my takeaways from the experience
Just getting into putting my thoughts into writing but I already love the clarity that comes from it. Would love any feedback you have!
As a market sector and an investment opportunity, developer tools had long been technology's underachiever. While demand for software products boomed, companies making developer tools failed to attract any significant investment.
As a market sector and an investment opportunity, developer tools had long been technology's underachiever. While demand for software products boomed, companies making developer tools failed to attract any significant investment.
Meanwhile, the debate over whether there was any money in developer tools raged on blogs and message boards. Pundits and insiders could only scratch their heads. They wrote pieces with such headlines as "Developer Tools: Why It’s Hard To Build A Big Business" and "Will Developer Tool Startups Ever Find Investors?" They speculated that developers would always be too tough a group to sell to. They had a reputation for being "do-it-yourselfers" who considered the buying of tools rather than building them akin to a shameful act.
Even when tools companies saw exits such as the 2013 Facebook acquisition of Parse, the maker of tools for mobile apps, the reported $80 million was considered on the low side. For some, developer tools would always remain a venture capital (VC) dead zone.
But then the unexpected happened. Slowly but steadily, and somehow without generating much fanfare, the segment evolved into a compelling growth story.
The Rise Of Developer Tools
As demand for software development has grown and workloads have become more exacting, developers — or perhaps their employers — appear to have become more receptive to spending on apps that boost productivity and save time.
The industry's prospects appeared to turn around in 2010 when some of tech's shrewdest investors began placing big bets on developer tools.
That's the year Marc Benioff's Salesforce paid $212 million to acquire Heroku, the popular cloud platform that developers use to build, manage and launch apps.
During the same period, startups such as Atlassian, Stripe, Twilio and SendGrid began to raise bigger and bigger funding rounds. Since then, the group has flourished.
Atlassian, the longtime producer of developer tools and maker of Jira, the bug-tracking app, went public in 2015. As of September 30, shares in the company were trading at $124 per share, giving it a market cap of $30.3 billion. In the company’s fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2019, it reported revenue of $334.6 million, a 36% increase from the same period in 2018.
Twilio, the cloud platform that enables developers to build real-time communications within software applications filed for a public offering in 2016. The company’s shares began trading at $15 per share, but as of September 30, the stock price had topped $106 per share.
Stripe, the internet payment service, after numerous funding rounds, is still private but valued at $22.5 billion. But the segment's watershed moment came last year, when Microsoft acquired code-sharing service GitHub, for $7.5 billion.
That's the deal that signaled that developer tools are ready to take a place among tech's great wealth-generating sectors, including software as a service (SaaS), e-commerce, search and social networking.
To see how the industry is flourishing, just follow the money.
No Shortage Of Opportunity
Since the GitHub acquisition, VC funds have continued to stream in.
Among the areas attracting interest include containers and DevOps, as well as artificial intelligence, security and gaming.
In security, Snyk, the British toolmaker that offers developers a security layer that is built into their workflows and pinpoints and corrects vulnerabilities, recently announced it has raised $70 million in funding.
Snyk initially focused on tools for open-source code but is now branching into providing security apps for containers.
DevOps builds bridges between IT and software development and has become a massive hit in C-suites. DevOps describes the methodologies that meld IT operations and software development.
The combined system then streamlines and automates the creation, deployment and testing of software products.
Last year, HashiCorp, the DevOps startup that helps companies automate their cloud infrastructure, raised $100 million in a Series D round of funding and was valued at $1.9 billion.
Also last year, JFrog, another popular DevOps startup, raised $165 million, and was valued at more than $1 billion. JFrog, in turn, has used some of that money to make acquisitions: This year JFrog acquired Shippable, which assists DevOps with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and enables them to transfer code and microservices.
Certainly, there can be no mistaking what all this means. The amounts raised are a testament to investor faith in developer tools.
But will it last?
No End In Sight
As long as the demand for software continues to grow, then the people responsible for producing it will undoubtedly continue to embrace tools that help speed up development.
And that demand shows no signs of slowing.
For example, Market Research Future predicted that the enterprise-software category would grow at 8% (compound annual growth rate) every year between 2017 and 2023. According to the company, at the end of that period, the industry would be worth $634 billion.
What analysts can't accurately predict is how the sector's prevalent entrepreneurialism, creativity and moxie will affect growth.
Software development is constantly morphing and already individual toolmakers are looking for new business models and methods to compete with the sector's behemoths: the Amazons, Microsofts and Googles.
No doubt, new software tools will be created, new startups will rise and slower players will disappear.
The only thing for certain is that only the earliest and savviest investors, as usual, will be in a position to profit.
"I want to write a technical blog! But all the good topics are already answered on Stack Overflow!"
Never fear:
Writing prompts:
- Solutions that are pieced together to fit a very specific use-case
- Solutions or things you learned because you’re able to read the source or the docs
- Solutions you came up with because you are skilled enough to override or extend part of a library
- Quirks that you discovered while using tools
- Better tutorials for new things
- Your own notes on how to do things
- Patterns or best practices that have worked for you
Never fear:
Writing prompts:
- Solutions that are pieced together to fit a very specific use-case
- Solutions or things you learned because you’re able to read the source or the docs
- Solutions you came up with because you are skilled enough to override or extend part of a library
- Quirks that you discovered while using tools
- Better tutorials for new things
- Your own notes on how to do things
- Patterns or best practices that have worked for you
Eugene shared his writeup on our Discord and I really enjoyed how LIP has helped advance his career:
Some choice quotes:
Some choice quotes:
- Early in his transition to data science, Yan started interviewing mentors for advice, some of whom were “rock star data scientists.” He asked what skills he should cultivate to be successful. The one skill a majority of mentors suggested was communication. The people he spoke with emphasized how communication becomes more and more important as you rise in the ranks. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But more and more mentors said the same thing,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This can’t be right, but I'm just going to try it.’”
- The number one piece of direction he offers is to write for yourself — what do you want to learn and clarify your thinking on? — rather than social engagement.
- The second piece of advice: “just write.” The best way to figure out your niche and your audience is to simply put fingers to keyboard and start practicing, he said. Maybe after a dozen — or a few dozen — pieces you find your voice, what you want to write about, or what resonates best with the people reading along.
- “If you never start writing, how will you know? Just like Blue Origin’s motto ‘Gradatim Ferociter’, which means ‘Step by step, ferociously’. Finding your voice and niche doesn’t happen overnight — you have to write and share your work,” he said. “So just start somewhere, anywhere, and keep writing.”
