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 Analysis
Aside from automated tests, code reviews are the best tool for ensuring code quality. Still, it’s difficult to do in-depth code reviews, because code is complex and there’s usually a lot of pressure to approve the PR and keep the features flowing. Also, traditional line-by-line diff of code doesn’t make problems obvious enough. Here’s a solution: AppMap runtime code analysis, which helps make code behavior obvious by reporting on the code as it truly behaves, as it runs. If you’re curious to see how this works, and how we use runtime code analysis in our own code reviews, check out our recent Livestream demo here!
Sharing the Love with Dev, Sec and Ops: Visualize a Pen Test with AppMap!
Petr, our Director of Product, spoke at DevSecCon last month about bringing security and development teams together with visual code maps. His talk demoed how to use AppMap to visualize a set of security flaws on a well known, intentionally insecure application. By showing security vulnerabilities via beautiful, visual maps (and not lengthy, PDF-ed pen test reports!), AppMap helps bridge the context and communication gap between pen testers, developers and code reviewers. Check out the replay of his talk here if you’d like to give this a try yourself!
Onboarding to New-to-You Codebases with AppMap
There’s a whole lot of hiring going on right now (did you see Shopify plans to hire 2,021 engineers this year?!) Starting a new gig is exciting, but it can quickly become overwhelming when you’re given your first task on an unfamiliar codebase. Suddenly you’re faced with having to learn a ton of new code in a very short amount of time. This is why onboarding (aka learning how new-to-you code works) is one of our favorite use cases for AppMap.
New Feature Alert: Inspect Command
Searching code files is easy. Knowing where code, web services, dependencies and SQL are being used when code is actually running isn’t so easy. Our new inspect command indexes and scans AppMaps to search recordings of your running code. It helps you figure out where misbehaving queries are coming from in the code, which code is using which tables, how to refactor code or tables into microservices and/or which web service routes are using a dependency (like a cloud API, email provider or security service). If you’re interested in trying the new inspect command feature before it officially launches later this summer, send us a note at support@appmap.io!
Incremental Testing for Rails
Running tests takes a really long time in large codebases, which significantly slows down development cycles. With AppMap, now you can re-run only the tests that you need to run as you change your code – all while keeping your AppMaps and Swagger up-to-date. Our new incremental testing feature for Rails is now available for design partners, send us a note at support@appmap.io if you’d like to give it a try!
Company News 💼
We have 2 new hires we’re excited to introduce you to!
- Former Shopify engineer Alex Torchenko has joined us as a Senior Staff Developer. Alex is helping us advance our core Ruby technology and is working on a PHP AppMap agent.
- Tech writer Lizzie McGlinchey has been working with us since February, but as of this month she’s joined us full-time as our Head of Content.
Kevin, our co-founder and CTO, is once again hitting the speaker circuit!
- On August 3 - 4, Kevin will be presenting at GitLab Commit. His talk will discuss how people in different jobs can get oriented faster and with more context, so they can better collaborate and communicate to build great software.
- On August 20, Kevin will be presenting (in-person!) at JavaScript & Friends. He’ll show attendees how to navigate the back roads of their JavaScript app to gain situational awareness and improve their flow.
Notable Content ✍
We’re constantly publishing new content on our doc site, company blog and Dev.to. Notable content from the past month includes:
- A personal Father’s Day post from our co-founder and CTO
- Our latest AppMap Community Profile
- How we’re building our DevRel stack
- How to take the guesswork out of debugging
- Onboarding to new code with interactive code maps
Also in content-related news, as we work to optimize our dev-led growth, we’ve found OpenView’s Developer-Focused Go-to-Market Playbook to be incredibly helpful. If you, too, are part of a company building tools for developers, we recommend checking it out!
Stay in Touch 💜
Thanks so much for reading. Feel free to ping support@appmap.io with any questions or feedback, we always love hearing from our community!
Cheers, The AppMap Team
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