DEVELOPER STARTUPS
5 Developer Oriented Startups at Web Summit 2021
This year at Web Summit in Lisbon, I talked with all sorts of startups trying to find the ones focusing on developer happiness by building software that help with their productivity
Quick side note: I am in no way associated with any of these companies, they did not pay me or influence me in any way… but a free beer with go a long way, just saying…
1) Sourcery — AI Based Code Review and Refactoring
We help developers do their best work by automatically reviewing and refactoring your code. Cleaner code means faster development.
Using AI to help developers write better, cleaner code seems to be the trend. Even Github came out with their own version of live code suggestions, called Github Copilot.
While Copilot is more of an auto-complete for your code that produces hilarious results, Sourcery takes a look at the code you just wrote and gives you suggestion on how to improve it.
Sounds pretty cool right… The bad news? The product is in Alpha and it is only available for Python. Us Javascript fanboys have to wait a little longer until we can test in our favourite IDEs.
2) Sturdy — Real time version control and collaboration tool
Share, try and iterate on code together using Sturdy’s supercharged workspaces
Remote work is slowly becoming the norm, companies are either going full remote or adopting a hybrid model. Either way on-line collaboration is more important than ever.
Everything around us is accelerating, so who can say what the future of code reviews are going to look like. Waiting days / hours for feedback on your PR may be too much for some companies that want features in production as fast as possible.
Sturdy is trying to solve this with a web based real-time code reviews / pair programming tool, that can be integrated with any git versioning software or use Sturdy’s own versioning system.
3) Snaplore — Visual documentation tool
Reinvented knowledge sharing experience at the speed of talking. Write less, share more.
We all know that writing documentation is not easy work. You have to put yourself in your users position, take away all the context you have and try to write something that is easy to understand and more importantly easy to use.
Snaplore is like the Canva for documentation, their slick software allows you to build an easy to use visual presentation, demonstrating your features or your endpoints and how to integrate them in your application.
4) < GEEKLE > — Online learning platform
Harvard style case-based education platform for SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS.
One thing I really appreciate about the industry I am a part of is the amount of learning resources we have at our disposal. From books, to articles to online learning platforms that teach you how to build anything using every programming language you may think of.
What makes < GEEKLE > different? They have tracks that showcase real case examples from big software companies. You can learn how companies like Netflix solves a specific issue that you may have yourself encountered in your daily job.
Continuous learning is a must in our profession, and who better to learn from than the giants of our industry?
5) NerdVision — Observability Platform
NerdVision is a modern debugging and observability platform combining autonomous error detection, production debugging and dynamic logging.
One guarantee we have in the Software Development business is that our code breaks.
We can write as many tests as we want, test it as much as possible, but at the end of the day in the wild untamed world of production, the user will do something that will not agree with your software.
Maybe he is using a browser you have not even heard of, never mind test for it, so we have to measure everything that is happening in production and continuously observe for faultiness.
NerdVision integrates into your codebase and reports all failures and even more it lets you debug production in real time.
The Web Summit conference was fun, with good vibes and it’s very refreshing to see all these startups working on sustainability / AI / healthcare / privacy / etc, it makes me feel very optimistic about the future and the direction the industry is taking.
As a Software Engineer, you don’t usually interact that much with other people, especially other people outside of our industry bubble, and this type of conference forces you to go out of your comfort zone, learn new things, explore new gadgets or software, hear other opinions that you may or may not agree with.
It is refreshing to watch all of these engineers have the courage to go out there and work on their idea and present it in front of a large audience. Personally it gave me such an urge to code, to build something new, to bring an extra layer of care to all products I am working on, and who knows, maybe next year I will be myself in front of a small booth trying to explain my startup idea to you.
