After a short summer break, we are back with the Developer Productivity & Experience Newsletter.
Thank you for all the positive responses to our 2nd newsletter! This motivates us to continue our efforts to keep you up to date with industry news on Dev Productivity, K8s, and related tooling.

Key-pieces

• GitOps: The Bad and the Ugly: Ádám Sándor, Cloud Native Architect at Container Solutions, came up with a great article about the downsides of GitOps. It's a great read as Ádám Sándor has extensive experience in the sector and also wrote about the benefits of GitOps in the past. There is some pretty heated discussion going on about this piece, for example on Reddit. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
• API first strategies have been around for a while. The best-known example of a company adopting this strategy is most likely Amazon with their famous “API Mandate” dating back to 2002. This is an interesting piece discussing how low code solutions (and yes, they are very trendy) can benefit from an API first approach. 
• Our friends at Personio recently moved to a loosely coupled architecture. They experienced serious monitoring challenges with the rapid increase in the number of microservices being developed. Filip Petkovski gives some interesting insights into how they tackle microservice monitoring through Kubernetes custom resource definitions.
  
  

We are in love with... 

• CircleCI and how they are boosting cloud-native CI with more than 35M builds every month. We recently partnered with them to simplify integrating Humanitec with CircleCI.
• The Robot Framework and we are using Robot Tests a lot in our own product development.  We even participated in the Robot Framework Online Konferenz on July 30th (in German).
• The podcast The Weekly Squeak by Chris Chinchilla and especially the episode about KubeCon 2020. Yes, Chris also writes for us… so it’s a bit of self-marketing.

Some cool content from us

Sandboxed environments allow for cool things like parallel feature development, parallel testing of feature flags, and parallel testing of microservice versions in different combinations. This article explains how Humanitec helps you to get started quickly with sandboxed environments.