Humans are prone to making mistakes. They can be as small and inconsequential as a typo in an email or as heart-stopping as the false nuclear missile alert that sent the state of Hawaii into a panic. In software development, mistakes cause bugs that take time, money and energy to fix.
San Francisco-based startup CodeSee was created to help teams prevent those costly errors, speed up the development process and improve the product experience for users.
What started as a part-time project last year has turned into a full-time enterprise for co-founder and CEO Shanea Leven. Both Leven and her husband were working at tech startups when the pandemic hit, leading them to reevaluate their goals. Eventually, she and her husband Josh, CodeSee's CTO, quit their other jobs to run the startup full-time.
Working at companies like Google, eBay and Cloudflare, Leven experienced first-hand the laborious nature of coding, on-boarding new team members and fixing bugs. It can take several months to a year for a new team member to fully understand a company’s code base, which refers to the complete body of source code for a given software program or application.
“You have ten times more code than you had 10 years ago with the advent of open source and libraries and all of those things. It’s a big code problem,” Leven said.
And when an engineer leaves, they take a lot of institutional knowledge with them, like where information and resources are located. The process of finding an error is largely manual, often requiring painstakingly combing through thousands of lines of code.
CodeSee attempts to solve these problems by creating a blueprint that automatically generates maps of a code base that are equally easy to see and understand by developers and non-developers on a team. It shows where everything is located and how it’s all connected.
Their product, OSS Port, gives users a visual walk through, or map, of the code base with color-coded elements to quickly find things. It also helps teams identify "hot spots" where there's a lot of activity.
Unlike architects who work from blueprints, she said, software engineers are largely working blind.
“We’re just supposed to infer what the building looks like from the code instructions and reading it line by line," Leven said. "To us that’s kind of insane."
The idea for CodeSee came about when Leven was working on a new feature for Docker. Two days before the launch though a bug emerged that caused a month-long delay. That kind of problem, according to Leven, happens all the time.
“There’s too much code for any one person to understand and so how do we digest that information? We think the right way to do that is visualizing it," Leven said. "You’re reducing the unknown unknowns that we all deal with everyday. And that, in turn, builds better experiences for every end user because our entire lives are run by software."
CodeSee's efforts were helped by a recent $3 million seed funding round to help build out its team and expand its reach. The round was led by Boldstart Ventures and Uncork Capital. DCVC, Precursor Ventures and Salesforce Ventures also participated along with angel investors such as Edith Harbaugh of LaunchDarkly, Guy Podjarny of Snyk, Dan Bentley of Tilt and Adam Sah of CVS Health Tech.
CodeSee currently has 10 employees located primarily around the US including the Bay Area, Seattle and Texas. Some of the team is also based in Vienna.
Leven wants to grow the team and is exploring different ways of managing a remote workforce. Opening regional hubs could be part of that one day, but unlike established tech firms that had centralized office spaces pre-pandemic, some employees who live in the same region are still around an hour away from each other.
That’s a human issue that code can’t solve.
