We’re proud to announce that AppMap’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aren’t many universal truths in software development, but here’s one: Architecture documents and diagrams are always out of date. And as Kevin personally experienced trying to integrate his first company’s cloud-first Rails app with its acquirer’s Windows data center product, a lack of accurate, up-to-date information about software architecture is really harmful to developer productivity and happiness.
The lack of accurate, up-to-date information about software architecture is likely a result of developers writing documentation not for themselves, but for end users. But since developers are the ones making architecture and code design decisions, shouldn’t they be the ones responsible for communicating and explaining their decisions to other developers?
Kevin’s presentation will outline why a new kind of documentation is needed – one that’s created by teaching code to document itself, so newcomers to the code have access to information when they need it. With three different tools, Kevin will demonstrate how such documentation can be automatically generated, along with visualizations of architecture and code design.
In AppMap’s ongoing State of Software Architecture Quality survey, 84% of respondents said they’d like to have up-to-date diagrams and visualizations of code structure. And yet only 19% reported using existing code/architecture visualization tools and that they’d like to keep using them. Clearly, there’s a need for better architecture documentation. As codebases continue to grow larger and more complex, now more than ever developers need documentation and visualizations that are always up-to-date, interactive, contextual and as close to the code as possible.
Tune in to Kevin’s RailsConf talk next week to learn more about how to automatically generate documents and diagrams of code architecture, and how to use this information to improve code understanding and code quality. Register here to attend, we’ll see you there!
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