New AppMap users like Stephane Paquet start out looking to solve a problem that there isn’t an easy or obvious answer to, like a deep and detailed understanding of the dependencies in their app. In Stephane’s case, the Ruby on Rails tool was too basic for his needs.
Stephane is a cofounder of ThePew, a tool utilizing progressive language models for audience engagement and data collection. In this interview, he talks about AppMap’s excellent support and what he’d be doing by hand without AppMap.
Where are you located in the world?
ThePew is located in Delaware, and I am based out of Palo Alto, California.
What made you want to try AppMap?
I was looking for a tool to better understand how the dependencies in my app were linked together as the original tool provided by Rails is pretty rudimentary. After Googling around this topic, I eventually found AppMap which has been part of my app ever since.
The feedback and support I received from the AppMap team has been excellent, which makes me want to use and learn more about the tool. They react when it comes to improving and maintaining their platform and toolsets. Issues we reported were quickly fixed and we were able to find workarounds in minutes with no impact on our development flow!
What problem are you trying to solve with AppMap?
When there is a security risk in a dependency we use AppMap to find where that risky dependency is and what our exact exposure is to the threat.
AppMap is of great help when we need to understand performance issues – it not only offers a way to identify N+1 queries on the database but also what code is involved in the data flow.
AppMap is great for when you want to understand an existing codebase and figure out what needs to be put into an API or other services.
How’s it going?
If we didn’t have AppMap, we would have to assign resources to manage the documentation and rely on CLI tools that would not offer the macro picture we get with AppMap. This process would be slower, less reliable and would not allow the same level of risk assessment as what we can now achieve with AppMap. Also, maintaining API documentation would be difficult, but with AppMap it is part of the development flow!
Overall, AppMap helps us improve our platform performances by focusing our time and engineering resources on the code parts that are most often used by our customers.
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