Jaime Jorge is a co-founder of
Codacy – an automated code review that helps developers save time in code reviews and to tackle the technical debt efficiently. In this interview, he shares the details about the creation and development of his company, as well as the plans for future development.
What is the story behind your company? What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
Codacy was born roughly eight years ago by my co-founder Joao Caxaria and myself, both engineers and software developers. We wanted to find a way for engineers to produce better code. As we started researching and looking for ways to analyze code at scale, we found that there was a very interesting space (especially in larger companies) where we could apply code analysis for them to review code faster.
So we started really focusing on the code review segment, and that has become a very important trademark for us. More than seven hundred customers around the world use our product to analyze code and to produce better software.
What services do you offer?
Codacy essentially provides an automated review product, served in the cloud or self-service in your infrastructure. We provide this code-analysis service in more than forty programming languages. Wherever you host it, we provide a product that helps you analyze code at scale, gives you insight on best practices, insight on security, and saves a lot of time in your code-review phase.
What is the mission of Codacy?
We see a world where everyone can impact the world around them with software at the speed of thoughts. With this vision, our mission is to build products that allow everyone to become not only software developers but also increase the quality of their own products.
What separates you from other similar websites or companies?
The main focus is that we provide the best holistic view on code-analysis in the market. We have the broadest scope of code-analysis tools there is. Name a programming language, and we probably support it within our product. This allows you to have not only a great spectrum of code analysis but also the best support in the community.
We put a great emphasis on getting every single tool that we integrate within our service to be continuously updated with the best criteria that the industry and community are supporting. That is the biggest difference between us and the competition.
Who are your typical customers and what is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
The best way to describe our customers would be to say that they are companies that produce software. They need to have solutions that are stable, maintainable, and that is matured in the way that they are serving their customers. In that regard, Codacy becomes their partner.
We provide a service that ensures quality for software developments. A company that has more than fifty developers, that is producing software at scale, and has requirements to grow very quickly would benefit greatly from using our product.
As you grow your team, you want to make sure that everyone is speaking the same language, and are producing software within the same quality criteria across different departments and organizations. We make sure that everything is standardized.
What are the plans for Codacy in the near future?
As we continue growing and as more companies adopt our product, we see a need to not only provide insight but to aggregate many of these insights and give managers and engineering leaders a dashboard so they can actually see the impact of the development life cycle in their business.
We have recently released a product called “Pulse”, and the aim of that product is to provide engineering performance analysis. This is a part of our engineering excellence program, and we are helping a lot of teams already. As the future unfolds, our objective is to become a company that helps engineering teams and software-producing companies to guide their products and their teams to success.
