Most developers don't like writing documentation for their own code, which makes life a little more difficult when a new team member tries to start working on a company's code base. And even when there are documentation or online comments in the source code, they often don't get updated and, over time, that information becomes almost irrelevant. Swimm, which announced today that it has raised a $ 5.7 million seed round, aims to automate this process as much as possible after the initial documentation is written, automatically updating it as changes are made.
The funding round was led by Pitango First, with TAU Ventures, Axon Ventures and FundFire investing in this round as well, along with a group of angelic investors including developer platform founder Snyk.
Swimm's marketing focuses primarily on helping teams accelerate onboarding, but it's probably a useful tool for any team. Using Swimm, you can create standard, but automatically updated documentation, as well as walkthroughs and tutorials. Using the code browser, you can also easily find all documentation related to a particular file.
The cool part here is that while the tool can't write the documentation for you, Swimm will automatically update any code examples in the documentation for you - or notify you when there's a major change that requires a manual update. Ideally, this will reduce the drift between code and documentation.
Founding team members - Oren Toledano (CEO), Omer Rosenbaum (CTO), Gilad Navot (chief product officer) and Tom Ahi Dror (chief business officer) - began working on this issue based on their experience while managing Israel. Tech Challenge, a coding bootcamp inspired by the training program used by the 8200 Intelligence Unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.
"We met with many companies in Israel and the United States to understand the engineering onboarding process," Toledano told me. "And we heard it was a little broken - and many times, we heard the phrase: 'we throw them in the water and either they sink or they swim.'" (This is also why the company is called Swimm). Companies, he argues, often have no way to train new employees on their code base, simply because it's impossible for them to do it effectively without good documentation.
"The bigger the company, the more knowledge about the code base is dispersed - and much of that knowledge leaves the company when the developers leave," he noted.
With Swimm, a company could ideally not only offer new hires access to tutorials based on the current code base, but also an easier way to start working on the production code base.
One thing worth noting here is that developers run Swimm locally on a developer's computer. In part, this is because this approach reduces security risks as no code is ever sent to Swimm's servers. In fact, the Swimm team tells me that some of its early customers are security companies. It also makes it easier for new users to get started with Swimm.
Toledano tells me that while the team has mainly focused on building the core of the product and collaborating with its first design partners (and its first group of paying customers), the plan for the next few months is to engage more users later. the beta product launch.
"Software development is now at the heart of every modern company. Swimm provides a structured, contextual and transparent way to improve developer productivity, "said Yair Cassuto, partner of Pitango First joining Swimmboard of directors. "SwimmThe solution allows for fast and thorough onboarding on any code base. This is true throughout the developer lifecycle - from onboarding to project transitions, to adopting new open source capabilities and even offboarding. "
