Tracks your software dependency drift
After spending hours upgrading Rails and the gem dependencies in our apps, we realized there was no good way to see how far out of date we were at any given time. DriftWatch does just that.
The DriftWatch app is starting to take shape. Yesterday, I got badges working with a simple URL you can paste into a Readme file. It will display your dependency drift grade as a letter A through F. Everyday, the score will update based on your current drift. I used shields.io to generate the SVG but we are serving it up from our app rather than relying on them.
Right, now it’s all an admin-only interface so only we can add new projects. But the next step will be some kind of sign up and on boarding.
Yesterday, our blog post laying out our whole idea to monitor software dependency drift was on the front page of Hacker News for half the day. The comments and feedback were excellent! Some were skeptical - so it goes. Others said there seemed to be a need for such a metric.
Overall, it just felt great to get the idea out there and highly motivating if nothing else. Here are some stats:
We wrote and published a summary of the idea behind DriftWatch: the need for a "dependency drift" metric that tracks how far out of date your software dependencies are:
https://nimbleindustries.io/2020/01/31/dependency-drift-a-metric-for-software-aging/
We're pretty excited to release this idea onto the world. We've been kicking around the concept for a while and have some prototypes metrics already. But this is the first time we're publicly discussing it and openly soliciting feedback. From here, we're going to try flesh out a business model with a subscription component and a free or open source piece as well.
Excited to soon launch DriftWatch!
Andy and I have bene kicking around the idea of "dependency drift" for a while. It's a measurement of how far out of date your software dependencies are, useful for measure your progress towards keeping up to date. Staying up to date is beneficial for so many reasons: security updates, new features and bug fixes and perhaps most importantly: incremental upgrades are much easier than huge jumps.
We decided to go with DriftWatch as the product name since it will watch your dependency drift and purchased driftwatch.app. Hopefully the domain will help motivate us to build it!
After spending hours upgrading Rails and the gem dependencies in our apps, we realized there was no good way to see how far out of date we were at any given time. DriftWatch does just that.