Dennis Pilarinos
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The Moneyball approach (Interview)
I think if you are a team that works with a lot of coworkers, if you have like 40, 50, 60, 100, 200, 500 coworkers, engineers, and you're working on a code base that's old and large, I think Unblocked is going to be a tool that you're going to love.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The Moneyball approach (Interview)
Typically, the way that works is you can try it with one of your side projects, but the best outcomes are when you get comfortable with the security requirements that we have. You connect your source code, you connect a form of documentation, be that Slack or Notion or Confluence. And when you get those two systems together, it will blow your mind.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The Moneyball approach (Interview)
Actually, every single person that I've seen on board with the product does the same thing. They always ask a question that they're an expert in. They want to get a sense for how good is this thing? So I'm going to ask a question that I know the answer to and people are generally blown away by the caliber of the response.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The Moneyball approach (Interview)
And that starts to build a relationship of trust where they're like, no, this thing actually can give me the answer that I'm looking for. And instead of interrupting a coworker or spending 30 minutes in a meeting, I can just ask a question, get the response in a few seconds and reclaim that time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, Unblocked helps large teams with old code bases understand why something has been done in the past. It helps them understand what happens if they make changes to it. Basically, all the questions that you would typically ask a co-worker, you no longer have to interrupt them. You don't have to wait for their response.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
If you're geographically distributed, you don't have to wait for that response. You don't have to wait for...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
you know you don't have to dig through documentation you don't have to try to find the answer in confluence and jira what we basically do is give you the answer by you just asking a question the way that we got to the problem was a consequence of our kind of lived experience we're actually going to call the company bother which is like you don't bother me i don't bother you right instead of like
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
being tapped on the shoulder or interruptive Slack messages. We could just use Bother and get the answers that we wanted.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
We didn't go with that name because it's a little bit of a negative connotation, but helping developers get unblocked by answering questions or surfacing data and discussions within the context of their IDE relative to the code that they're looking at is something that thousands of developers love so far.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
A lot of code generation tools help you write the code to solve a problem. We sit upstream of that. Our goal is to help provide the context that you need. If you think about where you spend your time when you're trying to solve a new problem, understanding how that system works, why it was built that way, what are the ramifications of changing something?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's the problem that Unblock tries to solve for you. We take the data and discussions of all of these, the source code and all those systems to provide that answer for you so that you can get that context and then you can go and write that code. We had this great example of a company who hires, you know, very competent developers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It took them five days, that developer, five days to write 12 lines of code. And his feedback to us was, it's not that it takes you five days to write 12 lines of code. It took them five days to get the information that they needed to write those 12 lines of code. And that takes probably about 30 minutes to write those 12 lines of code and rip off that PR.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Oh, it's the same one.