Tanagram Roadmap: September 2024
Tanagram is no longer a nights-and-weekends project — I'm now working on Tanagram full time, with support from Pear.
I started Tanagram to explore the idea of browsing a codebase like a database. For most of the project's existence, I've been building prototypes to explore the feasibility and existing tooling for parsing code and extracting the necessary information to build such a database. Along the way, I've learned a lot about the problems developers run into in development flows, both from my experience at Stripe and from talking to dozens of developers at a range of different companies.
These conversations have built my conviction that a database is a valid and valuable way to browse, understand, and change code, especially across large codebases that may span many (e.g. hundreds or thousands of) repositories.
I have many ideas for applications built on top of such a database, including detailed browsers to navigate code along different dimensions, the ability to build a custom schema and precisely query code, and automating time-intensive migrations and refactorings across large codebases. In the fullness of time, I see an opportunity to build a new, modern IDE, centered around code-as-data instead of code-as-text.
Let me know if Tanagram sounds interesting to you, especially if this is a problem space you'd like to work on. I'm looking for a cofounder or founding engineer to help me build — we'll be working with parsers, compiler tooling, graph algorithms, and building polished products we can be proud of.