<aside> 🐌 “[Before Replay] We spent somewhere between 1-2 hours per day per dev in this reproducibility purgatory. The toll this was taking on our development velocity and our ability to respond and resolve issues was huge. We thought there must be a better way.” - Mark Probst, CTO
</aside>
Founded in 2018, Glide lets anyone easily create mobile apps without writing a single line of code. Glide’s mission is to create a billion new software developers by 2030 (something we care deeply about). The company lets people create and distribute mobile apps generated from spreadsheets with custom actions and workflows.
Glide started with mobile apps and recently launched Glide Pages for websites. Glide is a leader in the no-code movement, helping people innovate and bring digital experiences to life across content, commerce, and – increasingly – enterprises building in-house apps.
Glide’s stack is fairly standard - React using Typescript on top of Firebase and Google Cloud Platform; it’s a unified stack with some Redux mixed in.
“We used all the boring tech to get our environment up and running and start shipping code.” - Jason Smith, VP of Engineering
<aside> 🐛 “When we found a bug in development and had to reproduce the bug over and over to make sure it works, it slowed us down A TON and was very painful. All of that goes away with Replay.” - Mark Probst, CTO
</aside>
You need a complex platform to create a simple tool for no-code developers. With a complex app comes a high potential for bugs and a high bar for getting releases right.
In development, Glide often ran into challenges that really weighed down developer velocity:
“When we found a bug in development and had to reproduce the bug over and over to make sure it works on my colleague’s side, it’s slowed us down A TON and was very painful.,” said Mark. Because it’s such a complex app, Glide’s code can execute a single function thousands of times in just at a few seconds, making it even more difficult to isolate where the bug occurred. “With traditional debuggers you have to be so careful not to step over the part where there is actually a bug. All of that goes away with Replay,” said Mark. “You can go back in time, add breakpoints, print statements and the Replay lives forever.”
<aside> 🚨 “Without Replay, we’d have to go on a quest, do a screen share with console logs open and it’d be a long journey with urgent Zoom calls that have to happen immediately or else the bug vanishes. “ - Mark Probst, CTO
</aside>
Glide’s VP of Engineering, Jason Smith discovered Replay and thought it could be a game changer so introduced to Mark and the rest of the team. You’d only have to record the bug once and then can reproduce it forever. Plus, the time travel functionality lets you isolate specific function calls.
“We were scaling fast and needed a more efficient way to build and ship faster as our platform became more complex – as well as to triage bugs to respond to customer issues at a faster rate.” - Jason Smith, VP of Engineering
Jason shared Replay with Mark as a solution for their reproducibility problem. Both were excited about the idea of eliminating back and forth when debugging. “Without replay, we’d have to go on a quest, do a screen share with console logs open and it’d be a long journey,” said Mark. “Oftentimes, we’d need to get on these urgent Zoom calls to ask for help that have to occur immediately or else the bug vanishes,” said Jason.