Developer Tools and Services Roundup
Keeping up with the shifting landscape of developer tools can be as demanding as the engineering work itself. New services and platforms promise to streamline everything from the job hunt to production infrastructure. Here’s a look at a handful of offerings currently gaining traction.
Streamlining the Job Hunt
For engineers on the market, Triplebyte offers a different route. Their team of engineers runs a centralized technical assessment that is accepted by companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Passing it lets candidates skip the initial screening steps at these firms, effectively turning the job search from a linear process into a constant-time operation.
For system design interview preparation, InterviewCamp.io provides a library of on-demand content supplemented by weekly live system design discussions. Their curriculum breaks down the material into fundamental, digestible building blocks.
Strengthening Security and Core Infrastructure
Application security tooling is evolving to better match modern development velocity. A new wave of products allows engineering teams to take control of AppSec by integrating security bug testing directly into their CI pipelines. Resources are available on how teams are leveraging tools like StackHawk and Snyk to automate vulnerability discovery earlier in the development cycle.
On the data and API front, two services are addressing common scaling needs. ipdata serves as an IP Address Geolocation API, letting developers pinpoint the approximate location of an address, detect proxy usage, and identify a company from an IP. It is trusted by over 10,000 developers.
For applications requiring state on the client side, FaunaDB is designed to add state to JavaScript apps with a generous free tier. For those building activity streams or news feeds, Stream provides a managed API that is free up to 3 million feed updates. Client libraries cover Node, Ruby, Python, PHP, Go, Java, and .NET. The service supports production feeds for more than 400 companies, including apps with 30 million users. Stream is currently hiring DevOps and Python/Go developers in Amsterdam.
Deepening Cloud and Architecture Skills
Understanding the practical, high-value components of cloud platforms is critical. A learning track called The Good Parts of AWS is created by former senior-level AWS engineers with 15 years of experience, aiming to distill the platform down to its most useful features without the hype.
For broader system design expertise, Educative.io offers a 4-course learning track on Scalability and System Design for Developers. It is designed to balance architecture trade-offs and build scalable enterprise software, and has been used by more than 300,000 learners.
