Here's the recording of our September virtual meetup. Three great demos today — I was remarking in the post-meetup hangout that I'm surprised and delighted that this community continues to attract people working on such interesting and varied prototypes. These meetups have been a blessing of inspiration for me personally, and hopefully for many of you as well.

Next month we're going to do something a little different — more on that soon! See you in late October 🎃

During my demo in the meetup ^^ (first 15 minutes or so) I was encouraged to post an update about Comper here, so here goes:

Backstory

Three years ago I was CTO and was often playing GeoGuessr in the office with my team after office hours. It was a lot of fun, and then a very creative guy from marketing said "Why don't you build that for code?" I thought that was extremely cool. In GeoGuessr, you're dropped in Google Streetview and have to guess where you are by clicking on the map. The closer you are, the more points you get. For software you could see a code snippet and also guess where you are. I realized the problem in building this for software was that we don't have a map, so I had to create a different user interface for the game. After a couple of attempts I gave up and decided to build a map for the software landscape instead. When I had a PoC I realized that having a map could be very useful for all kinds of things! Then I quit my job, spent some time freelancing (I needed a break after that company) and saving up. In December last year I really started building, so now I'm starting to show Comper - comper.io to the world .

What is it

Comper is going to be the Google Maps for software organizations. With it, you visualize your landscape, zoom in and out, and use overlays to see different aspects (quality, security, complexity, productivity, .....). You can zoom in all the way to code using dynamic treemaps.

Here's a video showcasing most of the features from two months ago: youtube.com/watch?v=j5dqxRUmf6U . I mostly did a lot of polishing and refactoring since then so functionality-wise it's mostly the same.

I'm currently working on better diagramming and letting AI agents figure out the structure of each project so that it can create diagrams automatically. I want Comper to be the living map of your software team that is always up to date with reality, and can truly be used to explore and discover the software landscape, by giving everyone the "lenses" that are relevant to them.

Next steps / beta program

For now I'm building it alone in Utrecht, The Netherlands, the company is getting incorporated within the next two weeks or so. Still need to figure out the business model, but I have no doubts: this will be extremely useful to software teams. You can't download it yet, but I'm opening a private beta program. If you have a use case and are willing to pay for me to give advice / insights using the product, let me know. Might be useful for a tech due-diligence, restructuring teams or something like that.

PS. it's built on Rust and the frontend mostly PixiJS and a bit of VueJS. Rust because I need to analyze all the history of hundreds of repos quickly.

PPS. I showed a very early prototype to Jack Rusher a couple years aback and he encouraged me to join the FoC Slack, which I've mostly enjoyed from the sidelines so far :)

If it's appreciated I'll post some updates somewhere here on Slack every now and then. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!