AppLand - Blog

AppLand Newsletter: November 2021

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately! If you’d like to have our updates delivered to you each month, you can sign up here.Product Updates 💻Auto-generate OpenAPI docs for your Django, Flask, Spring and Rails apps!Keeping OpenAPI documentation accurate and up-to-date can be really challenging and time consuming. But it’s important to do to prevent collaboration set-backs, broken applications and integrations, and an overall inefficient use of OpenAPI automation tools. Here’s some good news: Now ...

How to auto-generate OpenAPI docs for Django, Flask, Spring and Rails apps

The OpenAPI Specification (also/previously called Swagger) helps developers model, document, implement and test web applications and services APIs. It’s a wonderful thing! And unsurprisingly, it’s embraced by dev teams and documentation communities across the globe.The trouble is, keeping OpenAPI documentation accurate and in sync with implementation updates – particularly for fast-evolving applications and services – can be really challenging and time consuming. It’s also a never-endin...

AppLand Community Profiles: Arnon Moscona

Community is a fundamental part of AppLand. Our community members and contributors span the globe, and play a key role in helping us make life better for developers. This blog series profiles members of the growing AppLand community and shares how they use AppMap in their daily work. Enjoy getting to know everyone! For more information on the AppLand community or to join us, check out our community site.

Early-Stage Product Development Can Feel Like A Pile Of Mashed Potatoes

The other day, I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind with my kids. I remember watching it a lot growing up, but rewatching it as an adult, one scene struck me given my professional journey as a serial entrepreneur. The scene goes like this:Richard DreyFuss’s character, “Roy,” is having dinner with his family. He starts helping himself to massive amounts of mashed potatoes and then begins scraping the sides of his mashed potato pile with a fork, sculpting it into a shape.Roy’s family lo...

Career Insights from a Developer-turned-CTO-turned-VC

If you’re in the Boston startup scene, chances are you know Bob Mason. He’s the ultimate friend to founders, particularly highly technical founders who suddenly find themselves charged with leading and growing big businesses.Bob started out as a developer. He studied computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and was one of the first engineering hires at Art Technology Group (ATG), which went public in 1999 (NASDAQ:ARTG) and was acquired by Oracle in 2010. Bob also co-founded a...

AppLand Newsletter: October 2021

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately! If you’d like to have our updates delivered to you each month, you can sign up here.Product Updates 💻Search Recordings of Your Running Code with Our New Inspect Command FeatureSearching code files is easy. But knowing where code, web services, dependencies and SQL are being used when code is actually running isn’t so easy. Our new Inspect Command feature indexes and scans AppMaps to search recordings of your running code, so you can figure out: Where misb...

How to detect and fix the N+1 problem for Java Spring framework applications

We’re going to demonstrate how to identify the N+1 Query anti-patternusing the AppMap plugin for IntelliJ, and the Spring PetClinic sample applicationas an example.The N+1 antipattern happens when a query is executed for every result of a previous query.If left unchecked, N+1 queries result in the gradual slowdown of the performance of anapplication, as they result in multiple expensive trips to the database.Detecting N+1 queries is tricky, because they aren’t revealed by any mainstream test...

AppLand Community Profiles

Community is a fundamental part of AppLand. Our community members and contributors span the globe, and play a key role in helping us make life better for developers. This blog series profiles members of the growing AppLand community and shares how they use AppMap in their daily work. Enjoy getting to know everyone! For more information on the AppLand community or to join us, check out our community site.

AppLand update - September 2021

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately! Product updates - New Onboarding Flow, Shallow recording, Ruby 3 support. Company news - biggest month ever for IDE-based AppMap installs, video library, AppMap workshops. Notable content in our docs site and blogs.

In a Remote-First World, Strategic Developer Alignment is More Crucial Than Ever

Recent research from Coding Sans reveals that nearly 98% percent of tech companies allow their developers to work remotely. In addition to obvious pandemic-related reasons, the rationale for embracing remote work is that it helps attract and retain top talent from a wider candidate pool. Still, according to Coding Sans, the ubiquity of remote work has introduced a serious problem... It’s now more difficult for developers to communicate with one another.

A Step-by-Step Guide for Installing and Using AppMap for Java

Here are the step-by-step instructions we shared in our recent workshop for how to use AppMaps to highlight a design flaw in a simple Java Spring application.

Tonight Only: Join the AppLand Team at the Boston Java Meetup!

We’re excited to host a hands-on, online workshop tonight at 6 pm EDT for the Boston Java Meetup Group! Come join us, all are welcome and we’d love to meet you 😊

See how Java frameworks like Spring work with your code

Spring + Your Code = ❤️ Most of the time! The one criticism that sticks to the Spring framework (and other big web frameworks, to be honest), is that Spring does so much for you it can be hard to understand what's really going on. Sometimes, we can just follow the doc and tutorials and watch the magic happen. But sometimes, we really need to understand how Spring, and related packages, actually work. And even more importantly, how they work with our code.

Lessons from a UX expert on how to design impactful developer tools

John Morkes is a UX expert. But he started out as a journalist. In the early ‘90s, John wrote for publications like Wired and R&D Magazine. Even back then, though, he recognized that a career in print journalism wasn’t going to be super stable. John was excited about all of the new technology being invented and realized he didn’t want to just witness that digital disruption; he wanted to be a part of making it happen.

Free CBD for Developers!

It’s thrilling to see our free and open source interactive code analysis tools continue to gain traction. Some of our ideas have actually been repeated on other blogs and with other products. Imitation is flattering, so we just want to keep on rolling and keep things positive. No bummer vibes here, it's all good. But it can be challenging to continue shipping dope visualizations and fresh ideas... We’ve been thinking a lot about how to differentiate our interactive code analysis product from other tools in the market, particularly static code analysis tools for codebases.

Make performance fixes easy to review by showing the before and after

Fixing performance issues is often harder than fixing bugs, because success is harder to define and demonstrate. How fast is fast enough? Are you sure that the fix will work in production, without testing it there? (Because development environments are so different than production environments, and production contains so much more data, bad surprises are common). Since there’s not usually a definitive test case that proves success, your performance changes can be challenging to review.Back in...

AppLand Update: August 2021

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:Product Updates 💻New to all AppMap Agents: Performance Data and Easy Sharing!One of the fastest ways to tackle bugs is to first be able to replicate them in your local environment. Now you can compare AppMap performance data to a reported bug to quickly verify that you can identify and replicate the issue. After identifying the root cause and making your fix, AppMap’s before-and-after performance data helps you confirm that you’ve resolved the performance i...

How to Quickly Identify and Fix Performance Flaws with Open Source, Interactive Code Maps

Almost always, the fastest way to address bugs is to first be able to replicate them in your local environment. By verifying that you can replicate the issue locally, you can reduce your mean time to repair (MTTR) when responding to an incident or ticket.As of today, the free, open source framework AppMap can tell you if you can replicate a performance bug locally, because now AppMap shows you performance data locally in your dev environment. You can compare this AppMap data to a reported iss...

AppLand Community Profiles

Community is a fundamental part of AppLand. Our community members and contributors span the globe, and play a key role in helping us make life better for developers. This blog series profiles members of the growing AppLand community and shares how they use AppMaps in their daily work. Enjoy getting to know everyone! For more information on the AppLand community or to join us, click here.Noé De La MoraLinkedIn, Github, TwitterOn Getting Into Software DevelopmentI’ve been into computers since I...

GitLab Commit Recap: How to Upgrade Your Development Workflow with Runtime Code Maps

Earlier this week, I gave a talk at GitLab Commit about how we can build our understanding of code, share that knowledge with other people, and use new tools for guidance and navigation as we create, fix and improve code. If you weren’t able to attend the event, don’t worry! I’m going to recap my talk here. If you prefer to watch vs. read, scroll down for a video of my talk.Here’s the problem I outlined:Acquiring knowledge about code is hard. And communicating it across teams is even harder.S...

Welcoming AppLand’s Newest Advisor, Pavi Sandhu

We’re thrilled to welcome Pavi Sandhu as AppLand’s newest advisor! Pavi is an expert on educational developer content. He co-founded Trailhead, Salesforce’s legendary learning platform, created educational content for Oracle and AWS, and served as director of documentation at Mesosphere and MongoDB. Pavi’s also a practicing psychotherapist and founder of a startup that’s working to make mental healthcare more accessible and effective.We chatted with Pavi about why he decided to become an advi...

AppLand Update: July 2021

We’re thrilled to share that June was our biggest month ever for AppMap installations 🥳 THANK YOU to everyone in our wonderful community who helped make that happen. We couldn’t be prouder to have you join us on our mission of making life better for developers!Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:Product Updates 💻Catching More Flaws in Code Reviews with Runtime Code AnalysisAside from automated tests, code reviews are the best tool for ensuring code quality. Still, it’s difficult to do in-dept...

Catching tricky bugs with runtime code analysis

If you’re using the Forem mobile app, you may have gotten a sequence of unexpected mobile notifications.Now, I love dev.to, but I didn’t understand why I got these notifications because I wasn’t involved in any of these threads! Well, an email from the Forem team (the open source code behind dev.to) a couple of days later cleared it up - a coding mistake had accidentally notified a small portion of users about comments they hadn’t subscribed to. The disclosure was prompt and even included a l...

How I take the guesswork out of my debugging process

There have never been more debuggers available, and it’s a good thing given how intricate most codebases are. Traditional “breakpoint” debuggers work great when you know what the bug is and roughly where the flawed code is located. But when you don’t know much about the bug or about the codebase, you have to get oriented before the debugger becomes a useful tool – and debuggers aren’t designed to help you get oriented.How “breakpoint” debuggers fall short“Get oriented” basically means “Read a...

How we’re building our DevRel stack

The AppLand team is almost entirely made up of developers. Our product, AppMap, is built for developers, so we spend a lot of time thinking about common developer pain points and how AppMap might be able to solve them – like how to debug when you don’t know what or where a bug is, or how to quickly understand complex code when there’s nobody around to help you.Recently, we’ve been spending more time thinking not just about building for developers and their pain points, but also about how to b...

Community Profile: Laurent Christophe

Community is a fundamental part of AppLand. Our community members and contributors span the globe, and play a key role in helping us make life better for developers. This blog series profiles members of the growing AppLand community and shares how they use AppMaps in their daily work. Enjoy getting to know everyone! For more information on the AppLand community or to join us, click here.Laurent ChristopheLinkedIn, Github, WebsiteOn Getting Into Software DevelopmentI studied engineering at ULB...

AppLand update: June 2021

Another month, another batch of exciting news to share! Read on to see what we’ve been up to and what we have planned later this summer. For the most timely updates, join our Discord, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.Product NewsAppMap for JetBrains Code Editors!You asked, we delivered! AppMap for popular JetBrains code editors – including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and RubyMine – are now available in the JetBrains official marketplace. For more detailed info, check out our AppMap for JetBra...

To All the Entrepreneur Dads and Father Figures Out There...

It’s almost Father’s Day, which has me thinking about what it’s like to be a dad and an entrepreneur.AppLand is my third startup. It’s a privilege to be able to build companies from the ground up and I get so much fulfillment from it, but being a parent and an entrepreneur is tough. I’m very much still figuring it out as I go. In case any other dads and father figures out there find it helpful, here are some things I’ve learned so far:Compartmentalizing is key. I never want to half ass my way...

New AppMap Feature Alert: Squash Bugs Faster by Recording AppMaps in Your Code Editor!

AppMaps help you investigate, document and fix bugs faster. Now you can record and share interactive graphs of complex, backend bugs from your code editor without needing to write test cases or custom code! Remote recording creates AppMaps by executing the code and tracing behavior to help you find the root cause of hard-to-fix bugs.

RailsConf Recap Part 4: How to auto-document database schemas

I’m wrapping up my RailsConf 2021 presentation recap today. Check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in case you missed them! This final post recaps the demo I gave on how to auto-document database schemas with a gem called rails-erd.An entity relationship diagram (ERD) shows the tables, columns and relations in a relational database schema. To auto-generate an ERD for a specific version of your code directly from the database, you can use the rails-erd gem. It does this by: Gathering database me...

RailsConf Recap Part 3: How to auto-document web services with Swagger/OpenAPI

Welcome back to my RailsConf 2021 presentation recap! Check out Part 1 and Part 2 in case you missed them. This post recaps the second demo I gave as part of my talk. Using rswag and appmap-swagger, I showed RailsConf attendees how to auto-generate Swagger files instead of manually writing them.The Swagger UI takes JSON or YAML files and generates an interactive catalog of your web services. The catalog contains routes, methods, status codes, parameters, request body, authentication methods a...

Let’s Talk Code Reviews

Ever had to guess about how your code changes work, if they’re secure or how the larger codebase will be impacted? Or maybe you’ve struggled to clearly explain your changes to a teammate or reviewer with enough context. Understanding and showing how your code actually works isn’t easy, and the last thing we want is to do is introduce unintended side effects that need to be reworked later.Join our Co-Founder and CTO, Kevin Gilpin, to talk about PR and code review challenges in our very first A...

RailsConf Recap Part 2: How to auto-document end-to-end flows with AppMap

In case you missed it, I’m recapping my recent RailsConf 2021 talk in a series of four, short blog posts. Check out Part 1 - We need a better way to communicate and explain our code decisionsThis post recaps the first of the demos I gave as part of my talk. Using AppMap, I walked RailsConf attendees through how to automatically generate documentation and visualizations for end-to-end flows – right in your code editor.End-to-end flows help us as developers get the right context. They help us f...

RailsConf Recap Part 1: Why We Need a New Way of Communicating and Explaining Our Code Design Decisions

Last month, I gave a talk at RailsConf 2021 on how to teach your code to describe its own architecture. If you weren’t able to watch it during the conference, don’t worry – I’m going to share a recap of my talk in a series of four, short blog posts.This first post recaps the intro of my presentation. You can watch this part of my talk in the video clip included below, or take a look at how I framed the architecture documentation problem and solution for RailsConf attendees. I’d love to hear i...

AppLand April 2021 Recap

Spring is finally here! Flowers are blooming, birds are singing and the AppLand Community continues to grow. Read on for exciting company and product updates, and a sneak peek at what’s to come in May.Company UpdatesAppLand and Engine Yard Partner to Accelerate Code OnboardingExciting news! AppLand and Engine Yard, the original Platform-as-a-Service product, have partnered to help developers onboard to new or updated code faster. Engine Yard’s new hosted, virtual developer environment DevSpac...

Announcing AppMap for IntelliJ IDEA

AppMap for IntelliJ IDEA Launches, Bringing Free and Open Source Interactive Code Maps to More Java Developers WorldwideBig news! After many requests from the Java community, AppMap for IntelliJ IDEA is now available. More than 70% of Java developers use JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA and we’re thrilled to deliver them access to our autogenerated, interactive code maps – right in their IntelliJ IDEA environment.“We’re delighted to be supporting the world’s largest community of Java developers with ...

AppLand Community Profiles, Marcus Sanchez

Community is a fundamental part of AppLand. Our community members and contributors span the globe, and play a key role in helping us make life better for developers. In this new blog series, we’ll be profiling members of the growing AppLand community and sharing how they use AppMaps in their daily work. Enjoy getting to know everyone! For more information on the AppLand community or to join us, click here.Marcus SanchezLinkedIn, Upwork, GithubOn Getting Into Software DevelopmentWhen I was 13 ...

Why Andy Palmer, Co-Founder and CEO of Tamr, is Backing AppLand

It’s an honor to announce Andy Palmer, Co-Founder and CEO of Tamr and Founder of Koa Labs, as a supporter and investor in AppLand. Andy is a legend in the tech community, having helped found and/or fund more than 60 startups spanning the software, healthcare and life science industries.Andy has a long history with Elizabeth and Kevin. He was a founding board member at their first company, Conjur, and has helped guide their careers as serial entrepreneurs and technical leaders over the past tw...

How to spot and fix Django ORM anti-patterns

A demonstration of how to optimize Django ORM by seeing how it makes SQL queries under the hood.I use the open source AppMap extension for Visual Studio Code to record the code and SQL execution of an application test case, and then display that information as a graphical execution trace.The graphical display of code and SQL shows how the ORM works behind the scenes.

AppLand and Engine Yard Partner to Accelerate Code Onboarding

Exciting news! AppLand and Engine Yard, the original Platform-as-a-Service product, are partnering to help developers onboard to new or updated code faster. Engine Yard’s new hosted, virtual developer environment DevSpaces includes embedded access to AppMaps so users can navigate their code via beautiful, automatically generated dependency maps, execution traces, and service and schema catalogs. AppMaps enable developers to see the impact of every line of code and preview the effects and side...

A Sneak Peek at Kevin Gilpin’s Upcoming RailsConf Talk

We’re proud to announce that AppLand’s Founder and CTO, Kevin Gilpin, will be speaking at RailsConf 2021! Kevin’s presentation will be available to watch on-demand once the conference begins on April 12, 2021. On April 14 at 4:10 PM ET, Kevin will host a session in Discord which will include a “group watch” of his talk and a Q&A. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect from his presentation:There aren’t many universal truths in software development, but here’s one: Architecture documen...

Beginners mind - How to effectively review your own code

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShoshinSpotting mistakes in code design is notoriously difficult. As the recent GitHub session management snafu shows, even the most seasoned pros have a hard time getting it right every time. We all want to produce our best quality code, and like writing, code improves in quality with repeated review and revision. However, there’s a problem of diminishing returns: the more ...

Welcoming AppLand’s New Advisor, Julie Gunderson

We’re thrilled to welcome Julie Gunderson as an advisor to AppLand. Julie serves as a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty and as the founding member and co-organizer of DevOpsDays Boise, she’s passionate about helping individuals, teams and organizations understand how to leverage DevOps.We recently had the chance to chat with Julie about why she decided to become an advisor to AppLand and the importance of open source communities. Read on to learn more about Julie and what she’s most excited about ...

Freedom to decide, responsibility to explain - How and why to automate your architecture docs

As we work, we all play two roles. Firstly, there is the “expert” role. We play this role when we are working in code that we personally designed and wrote. We know how it works, and we are the go-to source for questions. Secondly, there is the “newcomer” role. We play this role when we enter areas of the code that are unfamiliar.When we work as experts, we decide.When we are newcomers, we encounter the decisions of others.In the “expert” role, we have a lot of freedom to choose the architect...

We knocked out our own site with a slow query

At AppLand, we make a free and open source tool called AppMap for VSCode that helps developers deliver high quality code by providing better insights into code design and behavior. But even though code design is our company mission, we still make the same mistakes as everyone else!In a series of posts, I am going to share five code design mistakes that we’ve made in the last three months. In each post, I’ll provide enough detail that you’ll know exactly what happened. I’ll also discuss how we...

AppLand Demos at the New York Enterprise Technology Meetup

We had the honor of demoing our new and free AppMap for VSCode open source product at the New York Enterprise Technology Meetup yesterday. Our Co-Founder and CEO Elizabeth Lawler shared how our interactive code analysis technology helps developers see, understand and improve the design of software they create and work with – no matter how large or complex that software may be.In addition to demoing AppMap for VSCode, Elizabeth shared how AppMap Cloud, our central service, constantly learns. A...

The Next Frontier for AppLand: Software Design Observability with Interactive Code Analysis

Remember maps? You know, those pieces of paper that were always impossible to properly refold. Or maybe you were more of a MapQuest print-outs person. Either way, we’ve come a long way since then. Today, thanks to the advancement of navigational technologies, maps aren’t really maps anymore. They’re interactive, robotic assistants that guide us and allow us to explore more freely and confidently.The beauty of navigational systems like Google Maps is they’re assistive without dictating our eve...

Celebrating the Women in My Orbit

Today is International Women’s Day and I’m spending it celebrating the incredible women in my orbit.Helping other women has always been really important to me. I spend a lot of time and effort helping other female entrepreneurs grow and succeed, whether it’s investing in them financially, providing regular mentorship and guidance, participating in public forums and events, or literally helping them craft their company pitch decks.I don’t do this for the purpose of getting anything in return. ...

Scalable JSON processing using fs/promises, Async and Oboe

I’m working on an OSS project called AppMap for VS Code which records execution traces of test cases and running programs. It emits JSON files, which can then be used to automatically create dependency maps, execution trace diagrams, and other interactive diagrams which are invaluable for navigating large code bases. Here’s an example using Solidus, an open source eCommerce app with over 23,000 commits! Each AppMap file can range from several kilobytes up to 10MB. AppMap has been used with...

Explore and learn any Python library using visual, interactive maps

I was recently answering a question on StackOverflow when I began to think about the root cause of many of these questions. Someone is trying to integrate a new library into their code, but even after reading documentation and relevant blogs, it’s not clear how to make it work. I’m sure we’ve all been there!When we read code, we’re using our brains to build a mental model of how the code works. When it’s going well, it’s engaging and fun. But sometimes, for whatever reason, the mental picture...

Ruby Giant - Amir Rajan, Creator of DragonRuby

If you’ve been around the indie games community for a few years, you’ve probably heard of Amir Rajan. He’s a game developer and the creator of the DragonRuby Game Development Toolkit. The story of how he made and promoted the hit mobile version of A Dark Room is legendary.In addition to being a smart, driven creator Amir is generous when it comes to helping others learn from his experience.My team at AppLand recently started an open source project for the Ruby community. We have a great deal ...

Observability of software design - What it is and why it matters

As developers, we have lots of tools for finding out how code works in detail, and rooting out problems. Debuggers, profilers, Wireshark, and their ilk are great for finding and fixing bugs, and also for building knowledge about how software works.But how do we build understanding and troubleshoot the behavior of software from a higher level? Software design is just as important as implementation detail, if not more so. Want proof? Check out the Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses, and ...

How to level up your software design skills

In September of 1995, I was a newly minted developer. I had some formal education in computer science and a master’s degree in engineering, but no CS degree. Fortunately, I was surrounded by some very skilled colleagues. It was a positive and encouraging environment and since I was quickly able to make myself useful, I got a lot of mentoring. Over the next 12 months my experience grew to the point where I felt comfortable and confident programming professionally in C++.As I gained expertise w...

Startups can still feel good about choosing Bootstrap in 2021

I don’t remember how or when I first encountered Bootstrap, but I do remember a late night in 2012 during which I ripped all the Blueprint CSS out of my company’s product and replaced it with Bootstrap. The company was an early-stage startup, the product was a SaaS application, and Boostrap was a completely new thing. The next morning at standup I took some extra time and walked my team through what I had done. I got applause. Literally. People clapped. That was a first for me.Needless to sa...

4 ways to accelerate JSON processing with Rails and PostgreSQL

AppLand is an open source framework that developers can use to record, analyze, and optimize end-to-end code and data flows. The framework provides client agents for Ruby, Java and Python (beta) that record running code and generate JSON files called AppMaps. Users can view and analyze AppMaps locally using the AppMap extension for VS Code, and also push AppMaps to AppMap Cloud for analytics, sharing, discussion etc.AppMap Cloud is built to ingest and process large AppMap JSON files. Our stac...

Effective SQL - Indexing and denormalizing JSONB

Lately, one of my favorite database features is the JSONB data type in PostgreSQL. To recap the SQL vs NoSQL debate: SQL crowd Structure is good! NoSQL crowd Structure is bad!With JSONB data in PostgreSQL, you can get the best of both worlds. We know that a rigid schema is not a good fit for every type of data, because not all real-world data adheres to a strict format. For example, log messages, errors, code traces, and JSON web services all return diverse families of data. And, there are ...

How to debug interactions between your code and the Rails framework (and other gems)

Rails + Your Code = ❤️. Most of the time!The one criticism that sticks to the Rails framework (and any other big framework, to be honest), is that Rails does so much for you it can be hard to understand what’s really going on. Usually, we can just follow the Rails cookbooks and watch the magic happen. But sometimes, we really need to understand how Rails (and projects in the Rails ecosystem like Rack, Devise, Sequel, Delayed Job, Resque, Sidekiq, database drivers, etc) actually work. And even...

There are things about whiteboards that I don't miss

Attempting to drag whiteboard drawings into our remote workflow exposed how they had been slowing us down.Sure, creating a whiteboard drawing can be fun and effectiveA good visual explanation doesn’t require an accurate diagram, it requires a diagram that is inaccurate in useful ways. This is where whiteboard sessions shine. A good whiteboard diagram has very few real-world constraints, or cluttering details. The process itself is a satisfying way to create real alignment.That’s great, but h...

Ruby on Rails is the world’s fastest web framework for startups

I’m a 48 year old developer and entrepreneur. I’ve developed professionally in C++, Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Go, and JavaScript. My current startup and my previous one were both built on Rails. Here’s why.As an entrepreneur, my definition of “speed” is “the amount of time and money it takes to reach an objective”. Code execution speed sometimes matters, because I want happy users. But once the app is fast enough, being faster doesn’t help much. Fast means “fast enough to get the job done”.Hi...

How Pro Ruby Developers Customize VS Code

I recently asked twenty-five professional, freelance Ruby developers about their favorite extensions for Visual Studio Code.This wasn’t a formal survey, just a way to dig into what makes for a great VS Code extension and use that to inform the design of our own AppMap extension.I tallied the results and a clear picture emerged about which extensions were top of mind for Ruby developers.The most popular responsesThese are the heavyweights. No big surprises, but it was interesting to see these ...

Why modularity matters - lessons from maintaining monoliths at scale

At AppLand, I work every day with companies both large and small who want to build and ship code more efficiently. We do that by helping developers onboard to new code faster, debug more efficiently, and avoid shipping with architecture flaws.Developing efficiently gets harder as code bases grow larger. On small code bases, concepts like modularity, boundaries, internal APIs, and clear areas of responsibility can seem like abstract or academic concerns. Compared to the immediate challenge of ...

Eager Loading and the N+1 Query Problem

Working with any popular programming framework today typically means using an object-relational mapping (ORM) library like Rails’ Active Record to interact with the database. ORM systems are a definite plus for developer productivity and general happiness. They also allow a programmer to get by with a little bit less knowledge (sometimes a whole lot less) about what’s happening in between their code and the database. But that convenience comes with some pitfalls, including the common N+1 quer...

Five things I learned about SAML from studying a realistic example

I recently dug into execution traces of a saml-rails example app, looking for “points of interest” in the code. Here are five interesting things that I learned about SAML and how to integrate SAML into a realistic application.Note: The code snippets in this post are edited a little bit for brevity. For full source, click through to the links.1) The SAML auth request is complexWhen a web site wants to login a user with SAML, it sends an HTTP request that contains a specially encoded auth param...

Unpacking SAML with AppMaps and VSCode

I recently came across a thorough blog post from Osso on the ins and outs of the SAML authentication protocol. In a former life, I was co-founder and CTO of cloud security company Conjur, and from that experience I know two things to be true about security protocols: They are important They are (usually) hard to understandSo, given the above, anything that I can do to help people understand a security protocol seems like time well spent.Since I, and the team at AppLand, spend all day workin...

SQL query from the view: considered hazardous!

Working with any popular programming framework today means using an object-relational mapping (ORM) library like Rails’ ActiveRecordto interact with the database. ORM systems are a definite plus for developer productivity and general happiness.They also allow a programmer to get by with a little bit less knowledge (sometimes a whole lot less) about what’s happening in between their code and the database. But that convenience comes with some pitfalls, including the common N+1 query problem. Wh...

Survey: State of Application Architecture Quality

We, at AppLand, are excited to be conducting a market survey for product and software architecture quality.This 10-minute survey is designed to learn more about both software structural quality and developer efficiency initiatives in software development organizations. “Software structural quality” refers to how well the code meets requirements other than functionality, such as robustness, security, performance and maintainability.Why should you take it? As with surveys of this type, we will ...

Using a Graph Database for Better Understanding of Unfamiliar Code

Like Dustin, I worked on a project for the AppLand Hackathon. I was particularly interested in understanding how to make the visualizations generated from recordings in AppMaps easier to understand.The basic structure of code can be somewhat hidden by its use of trivial helper classes. Theses are classes with simple functions (getters, setters, predicates, etc) that don’t use other classes. I wanted to see if there was a way to use a graph database to help identify such classes in an unfamili...

Pre-debugging with AppMaps in VSCode

You’ve got a bug to fix. You’ve got the code, you’ve got a development environment, you’ve got everything setup in VSCode. You’re ready to start adding breakpoints and digging in. The problem is… where to start? Debuggers are great for inspecting the behavior of code within a particular function, or small neighborhood of related functions. But they don’t point you in the right direction when you first start an investigation of a bug. A breakpoint will tell me exactly what’s going on in the c...

Using AppMap and VSCode to ramp up on a codebase

Ramping up on an unfamiliar codebase is challenging. Even when the code is “clean”, the initial experience of opening up the code editor with dozens of folders, hundreds or thousands of files, is really daunting. It’s hard to know where to start, it’s hard to know which parts of the code are relevant to your task, and it’s hard to know how all the different pieces fit together. Today, we are introducing theAppMap extension for VSCode, which automatically records and diagrams software behavior...

Uncovering critical data access using AppMaps

As part of a recent hackathon project, I pulled together some data insights from AppMap data.For those unfamiliar, the AppMap framework is a suite of tools that allows developers to record runtime data from their applications. An AppMap agent, is responsible for capturing this data from a live application. It emits a file containing the recorded execution flow, data snapshots, high level process I/O (think HTTP, SQL queries, etc.) and some application metadata. I figured it would be an intere...

AppMap: A framework for monitoring end-to-end code and data flows

There has been a tremendous increase in the number of products and metrics for the DevOps toolchain, particularly in the delivery of software to the production environment, and the automation and standardization of the quality control of code.But one area has lingered as an “unmetriced” area of the SDLC for the last 20 years since the agile development and DevOps movements took flight: analysis of end-to-end code and data flows.With this in mind, we designed the AppMap framework to address th...

How to unblock yourself with AppMap

I was recently answering a question on StackOverflow when I began to think about a really common problem which is evident among the questions posted on SO. The problem is that sometimes, even after reading documentation and blogs, it’s not clear how to get an open-source library to do what you want. People can struggle for hours or days on these problems. This is the fundamental gist of many, many SO questions.The two most common techniques that developers use to unblock their understanding a...

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