Community is a fundamental part of AppMap. 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 AppMap community and sharing how they use AppMap in their daily work. Enjoy getting to know everyone! For more information on the AppMap community or to join us, click here.
Marcus Sanchez
On Getting Into Software Development
When I was 13 years old, I broke my collarbone. It wasn’t great timing, as it happened right before Christmas, but one of the presents I got that year was a PC. I started messing around with a Duke Nukem 3D config file to make the game I was playing behave how I wanted it to, and that was it! I was hooked. I got so into programming I forgot it was Christmas and that my collarbone was broken.
A few years later, I started participating in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contests and I haven’t looked back since. Today, I spend the majority of my time building back-end solutions for fintech companies, both for large enterprises and startups.
On Pet Peeves and Preferences
My biggest pet peeve is when developers overcomplicate whole architectures just because they want to try every new framework or solution.
As far as I’m concerned, tabs shouldn’t even be an option! Spaces all the way. Also, you need a dark theme if you’re going to rule the world 😎
My favorite keyboard shortcut is for organizing imports: ctrl + shift + O
On Finding AppMap
I’m always looking to learn by doing, so when I had the opportunity to test a beta version of AppMap, I jumped at it. I asked questions, shared feedback and started helping other newcomers to the product. The AppMap team had a great attitude and asked me to join their community, which I gladly did!
Recently, I’ve been working with Kotlin projects. AppMap Diagrams are helping me learn Kotlin and figure out new codebases much faster. This year, for example, I started working on a big project that was already a couple of years old. 400 developers were already working on it so I had a lot of catching up to do. The most complex part of the project was written in Kotlin, but I was able to run AppMap and instantly see the bigger picture. With over 1,500 tests in the project I still haven’t seen every aspect of the codebase, but every time I need to modify a new module I can use AppMap’s graphical, auto-generated documentation and easily understand how things work in that part of the system before I start thinking about my solution.
Overall, I love how AppMap Diagrams help me refactor messy code to clear patterns, or at least to more professional code. It saves a ton of time and allows me to find code smells quicker. Being able to think graphically about which pattern is best for the refactor is also a huge win.
On Contributing to AppMap
I helped build the first version of the Maven and Gradle plug-ins. I’m hoping to contribute to the AppMap Java extension, too.
I’m really excited to see parallel test support come to AppMap.
On Life Outside of Work
I like to work with my hands and create things. I do a lot of carpentry and interior functional design, which honestly is a lot like programming, just without the computer!
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