In this episode of the Manhattans Project, special guests Matt Watson and Jason Taylor from Stackify join me to talk about their new free development monitoring utility, Prefix. What is Prefix, and what makes it “The Developer’s Sidekick?” How can it be used to repair application code problems in real time, and how does that complement a DevOps workflow? Let’s find out! Here are some highlights from our chat:
Michael: So you’re here today to talk about Prefix, which is a tool you’ve put out for developers. What is it a free version of, and what does it do?
Matt: Our normal paid offerings are for monitoring the performance of servers. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloud in Azure, virtual, app service, all of those things. We work with all of them. What we did is take the same code profiling technology from under the hood and made a developer version so they could run it on their workstations. Now, there are other profilers that exist and that developers use, but what’s unique about Prefix is that it’s very lightweight and they can run it all the time.
So we like to say it’s the developer’s sidekick. They can have Prefix up on their second monitor so as they’re writing and testing code, they can glance over and see all the web requests in real time as they happen.
Michael: Since we’re talking a lot about simple usage, say a developer goes to prefix.io, downloads your installer and goes to set it up. How long until they have something up and running?
Jason: In both cases [server or local machine] it’s the same install process. You click “next” a couple times, click “finish” and then magic happens. It’s a testament to that simplicity that every day on Twitter we have developers reaching out to us saying, “Hey I just installed Prefix and it surfaced this unhandled exception that was causing me problems that I didn’t even know about. Thanks!”
Matt: I always say that’s awesome, but I’m sorry. I’m glad to hear it’s working and you found the problems, but I’m sorry there are problems.
Jason: We love your horrible code!
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You can find Stackify on Twitter at @stackify and download Prefix at www.prefix.io
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