Software development is a never-ending process of downloading, setting up and working with other people’s code. Some are written by people you know, while others are written by people you have never met, but who have contributed to libraries online. Developers are responsible for managing their local environments, package versioning, as well as other tasks. dependency hellIn this complex and often hostile environment. This friction and toil is amplified when you are working on multiple parts of the same code base. These problems are magnified by the shift to hybrid work.
Security risks can also be present in client-side environments that are not managed individually. According to OWASPAnd OthersModern commercial applications are 60%-70% open source, as a percentage of the code base. It is difficult to navigate the dependency tree, with the median open source dependencies per app ranging from 528 to 615 (per Synopsis) to 683 (per GitHub). After the log4j scandal, the software supply chain is now the top security concern. Software supply chain vulnerabilities can cause problems for developers if they are found in the downstream.
These security and productivity issues make it obvious that web development should be moved to the web. Figma and Google Docs did this for designers and knowledge workers. It is worth understanding why 99% of web development today still takes place on local clients.
Cloud developer environments are heavy and expensive. They cannot work offline and are severely impacted with latency. Imagine if Google Docs were a service that charged per minute, took a long time to load any document, and required users to wait for each keystroke to appear. Toy Playgrounds, which only support front end code, cannot replace core stull-stack workflows and toolchains. Luckily, the browser-as-operating-system continues to advance and the increasing maturity of WebAssembly and new browser capabilities create new opportunities.
Enter StackBlitzThe first production-grade web development environment. It is a favorite VSCode IDE for the browser that leverages local machine resources. There is no container or VM.
StackBlitz automatically installs dependencies, compiles, bundles, and hot reloads as you type. You can spin up an environment and build tools instantly in milliseconds. This is significantly faster than what you would do on a local machine. StackBlitz is offline-friendly and supports full stack Node.js toolsharks. Every environment in StackBlitz has a URL that allows you to preview it and share it. StackBlitz uses a combination of StackBlitz and GitHub to enable this magic. WebContainersTheir emerging virtualization technology powered WebAssembly, which runs entirely within the browser security system sandbox.
We are delighted to announce We led a $7.9M seed round at StackBlitz. From the first coffee meeting, it was evident Eric Simons & Albert Pai are exceptional innovators & entrepreneurs. It was also clear that they are missionary founders, unafraid of serious technical challenges. Always execute with the highest level of hustle. The community of developers has given them a tremendous reception, with more than 2 million active users monthly. Their users range from beginners to senior engineers in every top tech company. 70% of the top open source JavaScript projects embed StackBlitz today in their documentation/examples, up from essentially two projects at the beginning of last year. They have established key partnerships with Cloudflare Netlify Vercel and Shopify. Bytecode Alliance. They have created a product that engineers love and refer to on Twitter as “really in love”, “crazy good in too many aspects”, “amazing tech” or my personal favorite. Absolutely insane! You have to give it a try. i swear it’s faster than running it locally.
StackBlitz also saw strong enterprise inbound earlier than expected. This includes from Fortune 500 companies in healthcare, financials, and tech. Even though the beta release was limited, enterprise customers have seen significant time savings and improved developer onboarding. This has resulted in millions of dollars in ROI. Teams who are trying to promote adoption of design systems, those who want to use StackBlitz live environments to accelerate prototyping and sharing, as well as those who want a better supply chain security posture, have shown great enthusiasm.
Zooming in on why all this matters: There is an insatiable hunger for software development, yet it is still far too difficult to code. We can support the mission of arming software developers. The web is the platform for economic mobility and access to coding. Albert and Eric have been committed to software development for over a decade. Their commitment dates back to their former company. Thinkster, a startup that teaches web developers. They’re doing the work and trying hard to move the ecosystem forward.
The StackBlitz team now numbers 20 and I couldn’t be more excited about the major releases and their extension to production-grade workflows. Ask about StackBlitz, and you can use it free of charge. StackBlitz enterpriseOr Join the teamThat’s the end of web development.