As code bases continue to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to understand how the work they’re doing fits into the bigger picture, where service dependencies are, and how the code flows. CodeSee, an early-stage startup, wants to give developers and teams a big-picture view of their code, the ability to see code type in Google Maps, and today it released its first commercial product, CodeSee Enterprise.
The product builds on an open source project called OSS Port that was released last year. The original product was designed to help visualize code in open source projects, and company founder and CEO Shane Levin reports that the community around the open source project has more than 10,000 members. Building a strong community from an open source project is a good foundation for building a commercial company.
While the community version remains free for open source projects and private repositories with up to three collaborators, the new enterprise product builds on that initial offering, offering the kinds of features that large groups of developers and enterprises need.
“Our enterprise product builds on the community version by providing an unlimited number of users for our code automation feature. Plus, it allows developers to see service boundaries, which is incredibly exciting,” Levin told TechCrunch. “It’s one of the behavioral questions. Companies are looking for a way to visualize how the various microservices in their codebase interact.”
See service map. Image Credits: See the code
“Using CodSee, we can tell you where services are used in the code, which is a big visibility problem in service-oriented architectures and microservices. [Developers] These services don’t know how to talk to each other, where they are in the code, or how to consume them. We can show this now,” she said.
The idea is that people who use OSS Port for some side projects want to bring the tool into their day-to-day work in organizations, and the goal is to provide a consistent experience, he said. “We want to make sure that developers who use the OSS port are working on it [larger] “Companies can access similar tools for open source repos under corporate code,” she said.
In addition to providing a visual overview of the code base and service dependencies, CodeSee also enables companies that need to enforce governance rules and maintain mapping on private servers to interact with the code.
The company was founded in 2019 and raised $10 million in January, including a second round of $7 million. CodeSee Enterprise is available starting today.
