About

Hi, this is Alexis, I’m CodePreview’s founder.

Founder's image

Besides running CodePreview, I have been also running a Software Development company (wiringbits.net) for a few years, where I frequently review code from other engineers, in order to optimize my review cycles, I started asking engineers to submit short videos showcasing their changes. Unfortunately, this has caused some drawbacks, like:

  1. Engineers need to spend time preparing the videos (guess what? it’s hard to be disciplined enough).
  2. The recorded demo may not include everything I’m interested in.

There was a time when I got the opportunity to try Vercel -a tool that generates temporal preview environments when pushing code to a project’s repository- I saw an opportunity to solve my problem with this.

Unfortunately, Vercel has a few drawbacks that prevent me from using it:

  1. It is JavaScript specific while we mostly work with Scala.
  2. Vercel does not include backend and its dependencies on its preview environments, which prevent me from testing API changes.

While there are a few other alternatives to provision preview environments, all of the ones I found are either cost-prohibitive (due to its per-user pricing model) or depend on Docker/Kubernetes which we rarely use.

In 2022, I decided to solve this problem for us and ended up creating CodePreview (there was no name by that time), which we have been using since then.

CodePreview started as a simple set of scripts to manage preview environments in a target server, by now, it has evolved considerably, including the CodePreview webapp that allows to manage variables/secrets as well as other project settings.

There are also a few other pioneers who are using CodePreview and have shared very nice feedback, which makes me feel that CodePreview is going in the right direction.