You wouldn’t expect an architect to build a skyscraper with just a hammer and a ladder, right? Then why do we sometimes look at developer tools as something ‘extra’, or as a ‘nice to have’, and simply assume that all that a developer needs is a laptop and an internet connection? A skyscraper is built in a fraction of the time and to a much higher quality if the team has access to top of the line equipment.

Today, we announced that Refinery is now generally available. With Refinery, it’s now easy to highlight the critical debugging data you need and to stop paying for the rest. Refinery is a sampling solution that lets you control resource costs at scale without sacrificing data fidelity. Support for Refinery is now also included in Honeycomb Enterprise plans.

Release 3.8.0 of the TrackJS browser agent added support for Web Workers, which adds some awesome new observability to the background tasks of your web applications. Many development teams have adopted Web Workers to their web applications to add offline support, caching, or to process heavy tasks. Workers allow web apps to feel faster by removing work from the user interface thread.

This piece is the second part of a two-part series on how focusing on cloud debugging practices can accelerate our DevOps intentions. In part 1, we explored how an increased move to the cloud pushed for the adoption of DevOps practices. However, throughout the past decade or so, since we have been looking at DevOps with the advent of the cloud, we have hit a glass ceiling in our DevOps practices.

As R&D managers, we want to make sure our developers are happy and efficient. We want to ensure that they have the bare necessities they require to develop the best applications, whether it be the right desktops, the right headset, the right brand of coffee, and as many cookies as our budget can afford.

Ever since Patrick Debois coined the word DevOps back in 2009, teams and organizations have been clamoring to adopt relevant practices, tools, and a sense of culture in a bid to increase velocity while maintaining stability. However, this race to incorporate “DevOps” in software development practices has resulted in a perversion of the concept. This does not mean that there are no successful practices of teams adopting DevOps practices, but the word overall has become a buzzword.

The R&D team at every company is made up of a variety of personalities- developers, tech leads, team leads, you name it. The Product team is also quite a diverse group and is usually made up of creative UI/UX designers and product managers. When you throw them together, you get a meaningful relationship that creates magical features for top-notch products.