Why We Started SourceField

It's not often devs leave cushy jobs to start a startup - if that were true, the likes of Google & Microsoft wouldn't have thousands of developers working for them. But that's what we did.

I left my job at Major League Baseball - literally my dream job - to go solo and start a company to fix software development. But why?

When I joined MLB, it was my first foray into Kubernetes (K8s), my first time with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - and it was also the first time I was able to see macro trends in software development. Microservices is where the industry has been heading - whether that be Kubernetes or AWS's Elastic Container Service (ECS) - we're making debugging harder. At MLB, we centralized debugging with a bunch of effort - we established a tracing-first network infrastructure with Jaeger and, for the Machine Learning Data Engineering team, established a centralized debugging platform with Grafana.

All of that helped, but there were still issues - we didn't want to debug quicker - we wanted to stop debugging. Debugging monolithic apps was easier - your stack trace had everything in it - you could follow the data and program execution end-to-end in a unified interface. But as apps scale, even the old method doesn't work. And why?

We've simply moved from a big data world to a big code world - where code bases have grown, on average, 100x over the last 10 years. But we don't have 100x more software developers. We need tools that help us grow our effectiveness.

The other part is that dev teams are becoming more isolated than ever - whether that is because devs switch companies quicker (every 2 years, on average), or because they stop communication with other teams at the API endpoint. It doesn't bode well at all to prevent problems from happening.

Devs have seen the effects of these 2 problems firsthand - AWS & GCP services have gone down more in the past year than the past 10 years combined.

What is hitting AWS & GCP today is coming for every other company in the next 5 years. It's the dev apocalypse - and that's what we're working to prevent.

-----

SourceField enables dev teams to know how risky a code change is, giving them the superpower to move fast and don't break things. SourceField's code intelligence platform analyzes your code changes, who & what is affected, and then highlights that on every Pull Request. If you’re ready to help build the developer tool of tomorrow, check out our open roles: https://www.sourcefield.io/job-listings.

‍