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Holberton raises $8M for its full-stack engineering school
Over the course of the last few years, the Holberton School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Engineering has made a name for itself as one of the more comprehensive coding schools. The two-year program trains full-stack engineers with a focus on the basics of engineering and sees itself as an alternative to a traditional college experience. Today, the San Francisco-based school announced that it has raised an $8.2 million Series A round that will help it expand its programs.
The funding round was led by current investors daphni and Trinity Ventures. The Omidyar Network joined as a new investor. With this, the school has now raised a total of $13 million.
Holberton is currently teaching about 200 students (who have to pass a pretty rigorous entry exam) and the plan is to scale the program to 1,000 students per year. That’s a larger cohort than the computer science programs taught at even the biggest schools currently. Past students have found jobs at companies like Apple, IBM, Tesla, Docker and Dropbox. Instead of charging tuition, the school takes a 17 percent cut of its graduates’ salary for the first three years after they get their jobs.
To enable its expansion to 1,000 students, the team recently moved into a far larger space in San Francisco that can handle about 500 students. As the team has repeatedly told me, part of its mission is to bring in a diverse group of students — and one that isn’t held back by the prospect of student loans. In its recent classes, about 40 percent of the students were women, for example, and a slight majority of students were minorities. That’s sadly still quite unusual in Silicon Valley.
“Everyone deserves a first-rate education. Students at Holberton come from all walks of life, from cashiers to musicians to poker players (as well as right out of high school) without the money, background and education needed to be ‘Ivy League material,’” said Julien Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Holberton. “With Holberton, they now have the same opportunity as the more fortunate and they leave with skills to learn for a lifetime. Our students compete (sometimes after only 9-12 months) with Ivy League graduates and get the jobs.”
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App Store shrank for first time in 2017 thanks to crackdowns on spam, clones and more
The App Store shrank for the first time in 2017, according to a new report from Appfigures. The report found the App Store lost 5 percent of its total apps over the course of the year, dropping from 2.2 million published iOS apps in the beginning of the year to 2.1 million by year-end.
Google Play, meanwhile, grew in 2017 — it was up 30 percent to more than 3.6 million apps.
Appfigures speculated the changes had to do with a combination of factors, including stricter enforcement of Apple’s review guidelines, along with a technical change requiring app developers to update their apps to the 64-bit architecture.
Apple had also promised back in 2016 that it would clean up its iOS App Store by removing outdated, abandoned apps, including those that no longer met current guidelines or didn’t function as intended. That cleanup may have well stretched into 2017, as app store intelligence firms only started seeing the effects in late 2016. For example, there was a spike in app removals back in October 2016.
Then in 2017, Apple went after clones and spam apps on the App Store. Combined with those apps that weren’t 64-bit compatible and those that hadn’t been downloaded in years, the removals reached into the hundreds of thousands over a 12-month period. Apple later went after template-based apps, too, before dialing back its policies over concerns it was impacting small businesses’ ability to compete on the App Store.
To see the App Store shrink, given these clear-outs, isn’t necessarily surprising. However, Appfigures found that removals of existing apps weren’t the only cause. iOS developers weren’t releasing as many apps as they had during the growth years, it also claims.
Android developers launched 17 percent more apps in 2017 to reach 1.5 million total new releases. But iOS developers launched just 755,00 new apps — a 29 percent drop and the largest drop since 2008.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean developers weren’t creating as many iOS apps — it could mean that Apple’s review team has gotten tougher about how many apps it allows in. Thanks to the spam and clone app crackdown, fewer apps of questionable quality are being approved these days.
In addition, some portion of the new Android app releases during the year were iOS apps being ported to the Google Play platform. More than twice as many apps came to Android in 2017 than Android apps coming to iOS, the report said.
The full report also developed into the numbers of cross-platform apps (450,000 are on both stores), the most popular non-native tools (Cordova and Unity), the rise in native development, the countries shipping the most apps (U.S. followed by China) and the Play Store’s growth.
It can be viewed here.
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GitLab adds support for GitHub
Here is an interesting twist: GitLab, which in many ways competes with GitHub as a shared code repository service for teams, is bringing its continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) features to GitHub.
The new service is launching today as part of GitLab’s hosted service. It will remain free to developers until March 22, 2019. After that, it’s moving to GitLab.com’s paid Silver tier.
GitHub itself offers some basic project and task management services on top of its core tools, but for the most part, it leaves the rest of the DevOps lifecycle to partners. GitLab offers a more complete CI/CD solution with integrated code repositories, but while GitLab has grown in popularity, GitHub is surely better known among developers and businesses. With this move, GitLab hopes to gain new users — and especially enterprise users — who are currently storing their code on GitHub but are looking for a CI/CD solution.
The new GitHub integration allows developers to set up their projects in GitLab and connect them to a GitHub repository. So whenever developers push code to their GitHub repository, GitLab will kick off that project’s CI/CD pipeline with automated builds, tests and deployments.
“Continuous integration and deployment form the backbone of modern DevOps,” said Sid Sijbrandij, CEO and co-founder of GitLab. “With this new offering, businesses and open source projects that use GitHub as a code repository will have access to GitLab’s industry leading CI/CD capabilities.”
It’s worth noting that GitLab offers a very similar integration with Atlassian’s BitBucket, too.
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Twitch’s extensions come to mobile
Twitch’s extensions – the tools that allows streamers to customize their channel pages with interactive experiences, including leaderboards, polls, schedules, and more – are now available on mobile. The game streaming company announced this highly requested feature at the Game Developers Conference this week, along with the launch of a web app for developers that will allow them to test extensions against production APIs across a variety of views – like the broadcaster’s live view, for example.
Extensions were first introduced to Twitch in August 2017 as a means of adding more excitement and interest to channel pages to keep fans engaged and, in some cases, to help streamers make more money. For instance, there’s an extension call “Gear on Amazon” that allow creators to point fans to their favorite products on the retailer’s website. When the viewer clicks through and purchases, the creator earns a commission.
That extension, not surprisingly, is today in the top five. The other top extensions include leaderboards from Streamlabs and Muxy, Streamlabs’ Stream Schedule and Countdown, and Twitch’s own Prime Subscription and Loot Reminder, which reminds viewers to use their free Channel Subscriptions on their pages to claim their loot.
However, not all extensions are immediately mobile -friendly, notes Twitch.
Instead, only a small handful have made the jump to mobile at this time.
This includes the all-in-one extension Streamlabs Loyalty, Music, Polls, and Games; Schedule (by LayerOne) which tells viewers when a channel is live; and World of Warcraft Armory (by Altoar), which shares World of Warcraft game and character progression with viewers.
In total, around a dozen-plus are available on mobile at this time, Twitch says.
Viewers can visit the Twitch feedback forums to request extensions’ mobile compatibility – something that’s up to the developer, not Twitch, as extensions are generally a third-party effort.
Since the launch last summer, the number of available extensions has grown to over 150, with over 2,000 developers signed up – but Twitch thinks more developers would build if the process wasn’t so difficult.
On that front, Twitch also announced a new tool for developers building extensions with the launch of its developer rig. The company said it heard from developers that it was hard to get started building extensions, and extensions were difficult to test. The developer rig is essentially a web app that lets developers test extensions locally. The rig includes the new “Hello World” sample code, with a basic backend in place, so developers can focus on building out their unique experience instead.
A thriving developer community that can help make Twitch’s experience better for streamers and fans alike is one of Twitch’s competitive advantages versus rivals like YouTube Gaming and Microsoft Mixer. Though YouTube’s streamer base has been growing, any Twitch rival has a long way to go to catch up.
The mobile-friendly extensions are available across both iOS and Android, in the Twitch mobile app, version 6.0 or higher. The developer rig is open sourced on Github.
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Facebook opens Instant Games to all developers
Facebook’s Instant Games are now open to all developers, Facebook announced this week in advance of the Game Developers Conference. First launched in 2016, the platform lets developers build mobile-friendly games using HTML5 that work on both Facebook and Messenger, instead of requiring users to download native apps from Apple or Google’s app stores.
The Instant Games platform kicked off its launch a couple of years ago with 17 games from developers like Bandai Namco, Konami, Taito, Zynga and King, who offered popular titles like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Words with Friends. The following year, the platform had grown to 50 titles and became globally available. But it wasn’t open to all – only select partners.
In addition to getting users to spend more time on Facebook’s platform, Instant Games provides Facebook with the potential for new revenue streams now that Facebook is moving into game monetization.
In October, Facebook said it would begin to test interstitial and rewarded video ads, as well as in-app purchases. The tools were only available to select developers on what was then an otherwise closed platform for Facebook’s gaming partners.
Now, says Facebook, all developers can build Instant Games as the platform exits its beta testing period.
Alongside this week’s public launch, Facebook introduced a handful of new features to help developers grow, measure and monetize their games.
This includes the launch of the ads API, which was also previously in beta.
In-app purchases, however, are continuing to be tested.
Developers will also have access to Facebook’s Monetization Manager, where they can track manage ads and track how well ad placements are performing; as well as a Game Switch API for cross-promoting games across the platform, or creating deep links that work outside Facebook and Messenger.
Facebook says it also updated how its ranking algorithm surfaces games based on users’ recent play and interests, and updated its in-game leaderboards, among other things.
Soon, Instant Game developers will be able to build ad campaigns in order to acquire new players from Facebook. These new ad units, when clicked, will take players directly into the game where they can begin playing.
Since last year, Facebook Instant Games have grown to nearly 200 titles, but the company isn’t talking in-depth about their performance from a revenue perspective.
It did offer one example of a well-performing title, Basketball FRVR, which is on track to make over 7-digits in ad revenue annually, and has been played over 4.2 billion times.
With the public launch, Facebook is offering Instant Games developer documentation page and a list of recommended HTML5 game engines to help developers get started. Developers can then build and submit games via Facebook’s App page.
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Here’s the first developer preview of Android P
Just like in the last two years, Google is using the beginning of March to launch the first developer preview of the next version of Android. Android P, as it’s currently called, is still very much a work in progress and Google isn’t releasing it into its public Android beta channel for over-the-air updates just yet. That’ll come later. Developers, however, can now download… Read More
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Google’s Flutter app SDK for iOS and Android is now in beta
Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming language,… Read More
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Stride, Atlassian’s Slack competitor, opens its API to all developers
The arrival of Stride, Atlassian’s Slack competitor, was probably the company’s biggest launch of 2017. While the company generally allows developers to easily integrate with its products, Stride’s API remained in closed beta for significantly longer than the product itself, which exited beta last September. Today, however, Atlassian is opening the Stride API to all developers. Read More
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IBM brings Mendix’s low-code platform to its cloud
IBM today announced a partnership with low-code development platform Mendix that will bring Mendix and native integration with many of IBM’s Watson IoT and AI services to the IBM Cloud. This deal is an evolution of a previous partnership that involved what was then called IBM Bluemix (now IBM Cloud). Read More
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Unravel Data raises $15M Series B for its big data performance monitoring platform
Big data systems tend to be large, complex and often hard to troubleshoot. In the world of databases, web and mobile stacks, application performance management services like AppDynamics and New Relic help ops teams keep tabs on their system. In the big data world, Unravel Data is one of the few APM players to focus solely on the complete big data stack from ingestion to analysis. Read More
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