The five principles of modern developer tools

Knock offers a suite of APIs enabling developers to integrate notifications into their products without creating and maintaining an in-house notification system, reflecting a broader industry trend where engineering teams are opting for third-party vendors for non-core services. This shift presents challenges such as managing vendor-controlled configurations, testing changes, and coordinating deployments, which modern developer tools are addressing by integrating with existing developer workflows. Key principles for these tools include allowing resources to be expressed and managed in code, integrating source control management, providing rich type definitions for better error detection, enabling local and CI workflow testing, and managing deployments alongside application code. By adapting to developer workflows and offering these capabilities, these tools allow teams to treat third-party services as if they were built in-house, thus promoting faster development, improved end-user experiences, and scalable long-term growth. Knock's CLI and management API exemplify this approach, though the company acknowledges ongoing development to further enhance its platform.