At Gitar, we’re building the modern software development platform – tools that offer a magical developer experience supercharged by advanced code analysis and AI. We enable efficient and reliable development at scale, empowering developers to do the best work of their careers.
Who we are
At Gitar, we love building developer tools! We geek out on compilers, programming languages, tools, and developer experience over biryani and beer. We wake up everyday to solve developer problems and to make code better.
To us, the ultimate measure of success is great developer sentiment. Developers should feel great about their tools. At Uber, we spent 7 years building a modern tooling stack that improved sentiment among Uber’s developers. Along this journey, we solved many problems, some using off-the-shelf solutions and others using solutions built in-house.
Today’s dev tools stand divided, fall united
In talking to our friends and peers across the industry, we discovered that the problems we faced and the solutions we built were not unique to Uber. Companies of all sizes face similar problems with their developer tools. There are lots of great tools but integrating them into a great, productive developer experience takes time, energy, and money.
We have experienced the personal pain of using developer tools that might work in isolation but definitely fall apart when integrated together. The space of tools and frameworks is highly fragmented with many open source and paid options. Each solution solves a narrow problem and goes only so far. AI can tame some of the complexity, but today’s dev tools bolt-on AI as an afterthought.
Every developer team goes through the same painful journey as it grows past a handful of developers and the initial lines of code:
- Builds and dev tools slow down.
- Tests become complex and flaky.
- Code quality degrades and code review becomes a bottleneck.
- Maintenance tasks grow, and tech debt goes unaddressed.
- Bugs and failures become hard to debug and fix.
- Developer infrastructure and tool costs pile up.
- Developer environments and documentation get out of sync.
- Developer sentiment tanks.
Solving these problems is hard.
Gitar's vision
Gitar defines the modern software development platform. It harmonizes developer experience with velocity, quality, and cost. It integrates tools into an end-to-end experience such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
We believe that a great developer experience requires paved golden paths: A ground-up redesign of the end-to-end developer experience that provides opinionated workflows. An experience that seamlessly integrates all tools and incorporates AI tailored to development. Leading tech companies have these experiences internally and use them to their advantage. At Gitar, we envision a world where we bring these benefits to everyone.
We believe it should deliver the following:
- Fast, reliable, and precise tooling. Builds, tests, IDE, indexing, linters – everything should be blazing fast with low false error rates to keep you in the flow. Tools should have SLOs so that they are as reliable as production services. Linters should analyze control and data flow across the whole program to avoid false errors. CI should manage flaky tests automatically – and preferably nip them in the bud with linters that detect non-deterministic patterns.
- Great UX with deep technology. Tools should have an intuitive and snappy UX that feels uniform. They should facilitate real-time collaboration with deep technologies from program analysis and AI weaved in seamlessly to create a magical developer experience.
- Left shifted problem detection with automated fixes. Tools should find problems as early as possible, ideally in the IDE where it's quickest and cheapest to fix, but with low noise and clutter. And instead of just reporting problems (introducing friction), tools should go further and fix failures automatically and accurately using advanced code analysis and AI. AI should take actions autonomously and with high accuracy from being tailored to code.
- Fully-managed development environments. The daily edit-build-run loop should be reproducible and fully managed with containerized dev environments that are centrally managed, cheap to create, and run remotely in the cloud for a speed boost. As a developer, you shouldn’t have to worry about your environment breaking or getting out of sync. And you shouldn’t have to think twice about spinning up as many environments as you need to work on multiple changes at the same time.
- Automated code maintenance. Tools should automate code maintenance (library migrations, dead code elimination, security fixes, feature flag cleanups, …), freeing up developers to focus on delivering features rather than paying down technical debt. This requires code rewriting technologies that cleanup source code as accurately as compilers translate and optimize code.
- Always-green repos. Merge queues should go beyond merge checks and fully validate the merge without impacting throughput and latency. The main development trunk should never be broken and always ready to ship to production with deployable binaries delivered on every commit. This keeps velocity high but is hard to do quickly, reliably, and at scale.
- Built-in performance and production profiling. Compilers and dynamic analysis tools should use continuously-gathered production profiles to generate optimized code (PGO), pinpoint performance bottlenecks, and find bugs such as data races and memory leaks.
- Observability of the entire life cycle. Developer surveys and observability into the performance of tools allow you to fix slow, inaccurate, flaky tools and to improve developers' sentiment. Ultimately, sentiment matters the most: developers should feel productive and love their development environment.
At Gitar, we want to build a modern tooling stack and deliver it to the world as a reliable service. Our goal is a magical developer experience everywhere and to unlock the advantages of great tooling for everyone.
We invite you to join our Slack community, where we continue to explore and discuss these topics further.