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:
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Today is International Women’s Day and I’m spending it celebrating the incredible women in my orbit.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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++.
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.
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 the AppLand server for analytics, sharing, discussion etc.
Lately, one of my favorite database features is the JSONB data type in PostgreSQL. To recap the SQL vs NoSQL debate:
Rails + Your Code = ❤️. Most of the time!
Attempting to drag whiteboard drawings into our remote workflow exposed how they had been slowing us down.
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.
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.
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.
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 query problem. What does that mean? Read on to find out!
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.
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:
Working with any popular programming framework today means using an object-relational mapping (ORM) library like Rails’ ActiveRecord
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 query problem. What does that mean? Read on to find out!
We, at AppLand, are excited to be conducting a market survey for product and software architecture quality.
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.
Ramping up on an unfamiliar codebase is challenging. Even when the code is “clean”, the initial experience of opening up the IDE 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 the AppMap extension for VSCode, which automatically records and diagrams software behavior by executing test cases. AppMaps provide a way to walk through automatically generated white-board style diagrams right in your IDE without any effort.
As part of a recent hackathon project, I pulled together some data insights from AppMap data.
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.
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.
