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The underappreciated power of technical project managers

Imagine you’re part of a software development team that’s working on an important new project. Everyone is excited about the work, but you’re running into trouble. The work wasn’t clearly divided up, so some of the engineers unintentionally did overlapping work. Meanwhile, neither the PM nor the engineers realized that they would eventually need sign-off from an external stakeholder, who doesn’t agree with all of the project requirements.

How reporting enables informed decision-making

For software development teams to make meaningful progress, they must invest in efficient monitoring, reporting practices, and tooling. This is because only by keeping track of select metrics, such as those pertaining to application performance, will you know whether you are on the right track. Without knowledge of whether the software is functioning and performing as it is supposed to, there is no way of knowing what, if any, changes need to be made.

Picking the right developer workflow tools for your team

The software development life cycle is by no means a short or easy process. From project design to post-production monitoring, each stage of the life cycle comes with its own set of workflow-related demands. Teams must develop adaptable yet agile workflows to prioritize efficiency while simultaneously ensuring a positive developer experience. Thankfully, there is no shortage of tools to boost productivity in software development team workflows.

Documenting your APIs with developer API portals

Developers need all the information they can get on APIs to get them to work in alignment with their vision. There is no dearth of knowledge in the software development industry today, but only when that knowledge is documented well is it of use to others. In the context of APIs, developer portals offer an effective way to document and communicate relevant information. In this article, we answer the following questions about developer API portals.

A step-by-step guide to successfully migrating to the cloud

If you have decided to move your infrastructure and workloads to the cloud, you know that there is no one-click shortcut for carrying out the migration process. There are multiple factors and particularities of your infrastructure to consider when planning and subsequently taking the necessary steps for cloud adoption.

SRE Fundamentals: Everything you need to know

Google has had an outsized impact on the world, from its unrivaled search engine to its expansion into a range of customer-focused services. It would be difficult to make an impact of this magnitude without also leading the way in the software development industry. One of its biggest contributions to the community is a set of principles known as site reliability engineering or SRE.

Building confidence with Cortex Discovery Audit

A microservices catalog is only useful if you are confident that anything stored in it is fully accurate and that the information will not become outdated. How can you be certain that your catalog stays up-to-date in the future? Should you look for an asset in the catalog and, despite finding it there, also double-check GitHub? The service catalog is supposed to be your single source of truth. The purpose is defeated if you have to look for what you need in multiple different places.

Best practices for performing code reviews

The process of writing code resembles the practice of normal writing - your first draft isn’t the final one. The code you write has to undergo testing, debugging, and reviews before it can be integrated into the final product and shipped off to users. Without these checks, the code would be filled with bugs and errors that may prevent it from functioning properly or cause security flare-ups.

How Cortex can help you get the most out of Datadog

With Datadog’s Dash conference right around the corner, we at Cortex have been thinking a lot about best practices for observability. To get the most out of an application performance monitoring (APM) vendor like Datadog, you want to make sure monitoring and observability are built into launch and production readiness checklists.