DEV Community: Tech Digital

Meet Column, The Most Important Fintech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of

Tech Digital — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:51:31 +0000

Welcome to the debut of The Upstarts Profile: quarterly, magazine-style profiles sharing unsung startup stories featuring our most ambitious reporting. If you’re interested in supporting The Upstarts Profile as a presenting partner, drop us

Smartphone Free Childhood Parodies Tech Bro CEOs for Charity Appeal

Tech Digital — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:55:06 +0000

The idea for the film came from Joe Ryrie, co-founder of Smartphone Free Childhood who wondered what would happen if social media billionaires were completely honest about why they don’t want laws to change around children’s safety on the platforms.

Executive producers Dulcie Cowling and Sam Ojari worked closely with director Amber Sargent and producer Jake Young to develop a script and execution that felt hilariously but also worryingly accurate.

The film has since gone viral on social media, amassing over 100,000 views on social media and even more signatures on their petition to change the social media age.

Demis Hassabis emerges as early Anthropic investor

Tech Digital — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:36:26 +0000

Demis Hassabis, the founder of Google DeepMind, was an early investor in Anthropic, a previously undisclosed stake that highlights the Nobel laureate’s growing influence across the AI industry.

People familiar with the matter said Hassabis was an angel investor in Anthropic, which has since become a key AI rival and among the world’s fastest-growing start-ups.

Google has separately invested billions of dollars in Anthropic as part of its cloud and AI partnership with the company. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei considers Hassabis a role model, according to people close to the company, which was recently valued by investors at $900bn.

News of the investment comes as former DeepMind researchers have founded more than a dozen companies since 2021, raising at least $14bn, according to PitchBook and Dealroom. They include UK-based Isomorphic Labs, also founded by Hassabis, and Ineffable Intelligence, which together raised more than $3bn in the past month from investors.

Silicon Valley of the East, even as firms remain dependent on imported American hardware power

Tech Digital — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:30:29 +0000

The Chongqing megacity serves as a laboratory for the Silicon Valley of the East, even as firms remain dependent on imported American hardware power
The current US presidential visit to Beijing signals a clear signal that China is ready to re-engage with the global market.

President Donald Trump has arrived in the Chinese capital flanked by a who’s who of American innovation.

Among the delegation are Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and – in a last-minute surprise addition that has sent shockwaves through the semiconductor industry – NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang.

Greg Holmes on Why Modern AI Demands a New FinOps Discipline

Tech Digital — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:28:33 +0000

With only 30% of UK firms tracking AI spend clearly, Apptio’s Greg Holmes explores moving beyond manual processes toward automated, real-time financial vis
The global enterprise software market is projected to reach US$1.4tn by 2030, according to data from Grand View Research, fuelled by a relentless shift toward cloud-native architectures and the Gen AI boom.

Yet, as technology footprints expand, the complexity of managing these investments grows.

Today’s leaders must focus on mastering the business of technology. This is difficult because 44% of UK IT leaders cite in Apptio’s Technology Investment Management Report a mistrust in data as their main barrier to making decisions.

Since its inception in 2007, Apptio has positioned itself as the definitive platform for solving this friction, helping over 60% of the Fortune 500 translate fragmented technical telemetry into clear business value through FinOps and automated technology business management.

Now part of IBM, Apptio’s reach spans 22 countries, providing the architectural discipline required to manage the volatile consumption patterns of the AI era.

DevOps engineers frequently copy-paste cron expressions from docs or colleagues without a quick way to verify ...

Tech Digital — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:25:17 +0000

Developers and DevOps engineers frequently copy-paste cron expressions from docs or colleagues without a quick way to verify what they actually do — you have to either memorize the 5-field format or open a third-party web tool.

If you've hit this before, you know how it goes — you open a cron decoder website, paste in the expression, and squint at the output. Or you open a man page.

As a solution, I created cron-human
Translate a cron expression into plain English and print the next 5 scheduled run times

It's zero-dependency Node.js, so you can run it immediately without installing anything:

npx cron-human "0 3 * * 1-5"
Output:

$ npx cron-human "0 3 * * 1-5"

Expression: 0 3 * * 1-5
Meaning: at 03:00, Monday through Friday
Timezone: UTC

Next 5 runs:
1 2026-05-18 Mon 03:00 UTC (in ~17h)
2 2026-05-19 Tue 03:00 UTC (in ~1d 17h)
3 2026-05-20 Wed 03:00 UTC (in ~2d 17h)
4 2026-05-21 Thu 03:00 UTC (in ~3d 17h)
5 2026-05-22 Fri 03:00 UTC (in ~4d 17h)
How it works
Pure Node.js cron parser: splits the expression into 5 fields (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week), evaluates each field including ranges, lists, and steps, then walks forward from the current UTC time to find the next 5 matching timestamps. No network calls, no dependencies.

Why I built it
Found repeated questions on r/devops and r/sysadmin asking 'what does this cron mean?' and 'when will this next run?'. Existing solutions are either web tools requiring a browser round-trip with no pipe/stdin support, or npm libraries like cronstrue that require installation and provide no next-run dates. A zero-dep CLI that runs instantly with npx fills this gap cleanly for the terminal workflow.

Try it
npx cron-human --help
Part of µ micro — one new developer CLI tool, shipped every day. All tools are zero-dependency Node.js and run.

Why right now is the best time to become a visual designer?

Tech Digital — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:19:56 +0000

Companies are shipping faster than ever. Every product team needs someone who can make things look and feel right. That person is you — if you build the right skills.

The shift is clear: AI now handles repetitive asset generation. That means designers who understand why something looks good not just how to push pixels — are in higher demand than ever.