We hear everyday how consumer and business startups are disrupting the status quo. Uber, Slack, Stripe and Airbnb are just a few of the unicorns that have taken the world by storm. What we forget is that underlying all this revolutionary technology is software -- the 0's and 1's that make Silicon Valley thrive.
Building Apps Faster
Developer tool startups are the companies who are building the software to power the products you love. We want everything to be better and faster. Imagine the last time you had to wait for a webpage or app to load? Didn't that really make you frustrated? Or, remember when your app crashed and you immediately rolled your eyes? Remember when you had to wait months for something broken to be updated?
To make the world of software stable and faster, developer startups are creating platforms that enable engineering teams to take your feedback, turn that feedback into a new product, and launch that new product to you ASAP. It is disrupting the way software comes out of the fingers of developers and makes it way to you.
Developer Tool Startups
To meet consumer demands, here's a few of the top developer tool startups trying to disrupt how companies engineer products and deliver them to you. I selected these because they cover three major categories: quality, new feature launches, and rapid development. Things all of us, even non-engineers, can appreciate.
RainforestQA
We have all felt the pain of a buggy app.. Rainforest tries to solve this by automating quality assurance (quality control) so that engineers can quickly find bugs and fix them for you. It helps engineers thoroughly test software before it ever gets to you.
LaunchDarkly
Ever wonder how Facebook and Google launch new features to you? They have built their own version of 'LaunchDarkly' in-house. LaunchDarkly is a platform that controls when people see new features and who gets to see them. It's why your friends will get a new Facebook timeline before you see it or why Google can test something really quickly and then turn it off. Companies use LaunchDarkly's 'feature flags' to launch new features to you faster and with less risk of them breaking.
CircleCI
Update... Update... Update... CircleCI allows companies to continuously pump out new software at a rapid pace. It allows engineers to work together more efficiently, which means that new code can be launched multiple times per day instead of months apart. Because engineers can work better together, you can get things faster.
The Future of Software Development
Everything we use runs on software. In fact, we take for granted that almost everything that we touch in our daily lives has software, from our microwave, to our car, and to our phone. The challenge moving forward is for large companies to stop acting large and for small companies to stop acting small. In other words, companies like Microsoft and Google are expected to pump out new things faster than ever before, and startups are expected to launch their next big app as soon as possible.
Developer tool startups pave the foundation for tech companies to move at a faster pace, to get us the newest apps, and to make sure those apps work. As more startups enter the developer tools space, we could see a major transformation in how software impacts our daily lives.