Understanding Codebases – Shanea Leven, CodeSee

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another text drug TV. Interview, I'm really happy to have on as a guest for this segment Shanae 11.

io that codesee. io Shanaya, welcome. How are you?

Thank you so much for having me back. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure.

So. io. So I think we got to start there.

Can you give us our audience? Maybe a little background on code seed that IO how you came to found in bceo here and and let's hear the story. Yeah, absolutely.

So I've been in devtools for about 10 years. I worked at Google and Docker and cloudflare and when I was working there on a number of different projects products we Basically had a bug two days before one of my big launches. A lot of obsinities were yelled two days before and you know, all of a sudden I read I just kind of shot it out.

Why do we not understand our code? I was just really really tired of trying to have these humongous code bases and only understanding a very very small piece of them. So when something catastrophic happened it was a it was actually a Hitachi.

Um, and so out of that frustration of that keeping happening over and over and over cozy was born. We are the the first code visibility platform where we can help you detect visualize and automate all of your code understanding so that you can ship code faster without sacrificing quality. And essentially we can take all of your code visualize it you can add any kind of information that you want and that information follows you throughout your workflow so that you have the right information when you need it.

Think about it as Google Maps for your code base. Got it. You know I can't tell you how many Founders I've met with who who's companies are based on built on.

Their own experiences and usually unfortunately, it's an experience like you. You know described their own kind of frustration with what's out there saying there's got to be something better. There's not something better.

I'm gonna build a God darn it and you know what and just go out and make a better a better mouse trap a better a better solution and that's a great story about it. I I I want our our audience to understand so really what we're doing here. You know.

Get get recently celebrated. I forgot if it's it's 15th or 25th birthday. I don't remember now, but it was some Milestone birthday, right and and when git was first kind of introduce the idea of You know a code repo a repository.

Will you put your code? And that you could share that code with your team what with the public in the case of Open Source with the community. What a great concept that was such an amazing content.

Yeah right changed it totally changed again. Yeah. Oh instead of downloading the tarballs and and trying to figure out what was there and then going through the code and then if you wanted to make a change uploading it, where do you upload it?

I mean having get was amazing, but you know, the world has evolved a bit. In these intervening years and right a pure Repository. Just a repository is just a repository, right we need we need more and and it seems to me that this is really what what would code see is about it's it's the Next Generation placed and I don't even want to call it get but it's the Next Generation place to store your code.

But more than store your code. It's the visualize your code. Yes to actually see it in in a sandbox in practice in in I don't want to use the word production but to see it in action, right?

So yeah, we're like we're trying to move we all need to store our code somewhere that's never it's not gonna change. But with the Advent of open source for the Advent of microservices with the Advent of all these things we need to actually understand our code. We understand more of it at a time and we need to be able to hop into Part and understand it quickly so that we can hop out of it code visibility is a kind of a new category, but there are a bunch of startups that are popping up to help with code visibility basically code visibility for your application is exactly what observability is is for production, right?

But we're doing it in development helping you to visualize and understand your code much earlier in the development cycle so that hopefully a bunch of things that would be a problem won't make it to production observability absolutely has its place and absolutely is incredibly valuable for just different problems. And so code visibility. Is this this new era and not just storing your code not just securing it but understanding in the first place.

I love it now. When we talk about the open source aspect of it is that in my mind. There's really kind of two.

Places where this applies number one, is that the The Hub itself? that open source, so that People can spin up their own if you will. Yes.

So open source Hub is of what is our community and that in of itself is open source the community and the website itself is open source, you can spin up your own and this open source Hub that we created is really an extension of our mission, which is to master the understanding of code bases. Including open source ones and yeah, right. So like it's we are in a place where we absolutely all of us.

We've seen we need to understand our open source repos. It's vital that we get more people contributing to it. We get more people understanding how these open source code bases work and the biggest area.

Yes. We can throw money at the problem that is a hundred percent needed but it really is breaking down the biggest barrier to entry which is onboarding and understanding the open source project so that we can make meaningful contributions and that's really what open source happens about. Yep.

Is it just open source projects that are stored on open Hub? Or can we put really any software up there? Ah, well, it was targeted mainly for open source Hub.

But I don't see why not if you just like so that's one of the things you seeing in a lot of the repos, right? And I'm not saying you guys are doing this now, but it could be a potential. Move down the road for you where you can have a private version of GitHub get up Enterprise or whatever that may or may not even be hosted in the cloud.

It could be hosted on in a data center. And it's a refill for you for your your own software that you don't share with anyone, right? Yeah, other than your own team.

I don't see why not. Yeah, why wouldn't you but of course look, Where was I was in Austin? Linux Foundation open source Summit 90% Of applications today have open source.

Yeah, and that over 90% So but when we talk about, you know the power of Open Source. Today, yeah, I was on LinkedIn someone I know. Because I need a former Gartner guy.

You know, it's funny when they leave Gardner they get enlightened, right? And so he puts on LinkedIn. It's amazing to me how many security companies are running open source under the hood.

I will maybe it's amazing to you. But you know, it's it's not exactly been a secret for a very long time so that you know, so many of these tools actually run on open source, and it makes the world go around so, you know something like this of course becomes very very important Yeah. Shania I need you to let's give that some URLs some you know information for people who maybe want to take a look at this for sure just open source Hub that IO and you can go upload your project there.

We have a really engaged Discord Community. We're almost thousand members any day now and it's gonna it's growing like crazy because people are really finding the connection. We've got one of the most engaged kind of opinionated communities for open source contribution.

And because we're really helping to solve this problem that other like issue aggregators don't like good first issue. All those are great to finding an issue. But when you're ready to make that contribution, you need to understand the code first, so that's really what open source Hub that I am helps you.

Okay, and then the company website is code c yeah c o d e code with your eyes. Right right. I know and and why should people go there and not to open source up?

It really just depends on what you're looking for. The our company helps you to help. You can essentially use code C.

The company code sees product for free is embedded in your profile page on open source Hub. So you really can go anywhere on either property. io.

We've got a lot of brilliant companies kind of forward-thinking companies using our platform to visualize code throughout their whole workflow and you know, we're really trying to make sure that not only you ship code faster, but you can also maintain it right in a quality way that doesn't sacrifice your speed. So all of that is not part of the open source hub But if you and we've also got some really cool things up Our Sleeve for services coming very soon. So all of that is really really exciting part of the company, but we also really really need open source of for all of us.

Absolutely and you know, there's your invitation to come back and tell us about these exciting new Services when they launch will do coming soon. All right. Hey Shania, thanks for coming on love love what you guys are doing something.

Okay. io. That's right.

io. Great new place to keep you project to visualize it again. It's not just keep your project.

It's to work on your project to visualize your project. Make sure you know what you got there and what that code is check it out. Sinead has been there.

I mean this was this was born of necessity of from our own experiences, which is always the best ones. We're going to take a break here on techstruck TV. We'll be right back.