TrueNorthCTO Roundtable - Dark Code: The Value of Visibility
In the game Age of Empires, the fog of war is a fun game mechanic. One single enemy peasant hiding in a corner of the map can make you lose the game. So, you invest in watchtowers to make sure you see as much as possible.
Modern software organizations face the same problem, but they don’t really seem to invest in more visibility. Having seen our fair share of problems because teams don’t understand the software they are responsible for, we decided to build a software intelligence platform around it.
Not understanding the stack as a CxO, engineer or product manager was already a huge problem, but with AI coding, we see that the importance of seeing the big picture is becoming more important than ever. Why? AI-generated code is shipping to production at a pace no team was built to handle. The code is often unreviewed, and invisible to the people responsible for the systems that it powers. We’re calling it Dark Code, and it hides all around your company.
Jouke Waleson, Founder and CTO of Comper, will draw on his experience building and scaling software teams to explore the gap between what leaders think is in their codebase and what is actually there. With a demo Jouke will show how Comper surfaces that gap and will be interested in any feedback to refine the experience.
Some questions we would like to address:
How do we surface and quantify the value and visibility of quality, technical debt, security, and knowledge?
What breaks when you don’t have clear visibility into your codebase?
If you had this kind of visibility, what would you do differently?
An honest conversation about hindsight, foresight, and where the two intersect.
Structure
Jouke's background and the origin of Dark Code (10 min)
The visibility problem: what you don't know about your codebase (15 min)
Live demo: Comper in action (15 min)
Why we are building Comper (5 min)
Open discussion: if you had this, what would you build, fix, or stop? (15 min)