The Unblocked Blog
A creative space for the Unblocked team to share technical knowledge and the latest product announcements.
AppDirect: “Unblocked has been a game-changer for efficiency and focus.”
For the team at AppDirect, Unblocked checks all the boxes and more, tying together knowledge dispersed across internal platforms and giving developers context right where they’re working. The gains in productivity have more than justified the investment.
A Year of Unblocking Engineering Teams
Unblocked launched a year ago to help developers get helpful and accurate answers about their codebase. Since then, we’ve added many new features, saved our customers hours of time every day, and reaffirmed our conviction that we’re solving a real and expensive problem for software development teams.
Cribl: “Unblocked is our number one tool for finding the information we should know but don’t.”
Cribl’s remote-first culture expands its talent pool and empowers its employees with flexibility, but with more than 100 engineers working across different time zones on a large, shared codebase, keeping everyone on the same page can be a real challenge. That’s why the team turned to Unblocked.
Connecting your code no matter where it lives
Unblocked now supports connecting to multiple source code systems at the same time - meaning you and your team can get answers from any repository no matter where it lives (including GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab).
Drata: “Our team saves 1 to 2 hours per engineer each day with Unblocked”
Drata’s globally distributed engineering team relies on Unblocked to get the answers they need about their codebase. With Unblocked, issues get resolved faster, tasks are completed sooner, and projects go more smoothly.
Your new developer feels like a fraud. It's your onboarding process.
New engineers face a tough learning curve, navigating a new role and a complex codebase. It’s no wonder they feel like imposters. We need to reimagine onboarding to better support them.
Answers, right at your fingertips, with the new Unblocked macOS app
The new Unblocked mac app provides a centralized place to ask questions, get answers, and view your past queries.
HTTPS Reverse Tunnel, now without the pain and cost
Built to enable the work of Unblocked's engineering team, chiSSL is a new, lightweight version of chisel that allow you to expose any local server running on your development machine to the internet with a valid SSL certificate all via a single command.
Unblocked updates: faster responses, better answers about your projects and issues, role-based permissions, and more
A number of new features are now available in Unblocked, helping you and your team get more of the answers you need about your codebase faster.
Unblocked IDE plugins now in the marketplace
Download the Unblocked plugin for Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE’s such as IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm and more.
Unblocked updates: Support for Google Drive, better answers for PRs and more
The latest updates to Unblocked include features like Google Drive support, enhanced Pull Request question handling, team member usage overview, support for Open Source projects, and persistent suggested follow-ups. Users can now benefit from improved interaction and tailored responses, aiming to provide better answers and a more seamless experience within Unblocked.
Unblocked updates: IDE improvements and support for all sized teams
Today we’re rolling out several new features to Unblocked that we think you’ll enjoy. Unblocked is able to generate helpful answers because it is not limited to the source code you’re browsing - it’s aware of your entire codebase and all the documents from the integrations you’ve connected. Today we’re improving how you ask questions, discover relevant documents / threads / bugs.... and making this available to everyone.
How we built it: Saving time and money with self-hosted runners on EC2 on-demand / spot instances
In Unblocked's early days, our dependence on GitHub's hosted runners became a bottleneck for both cost and performance. In response, we created a custom GitHub Action that automatically deploys self-hosted ephemeral runners to EC2 using Spot or On-Demand instances. In this article, we share why and how we've done this — and why it might help you too.
“Get Unblocked”
Today we're publicly launching Unblocked, a new developer tool that increases your productivity by providing helpful and accurate answers to questions about your codebase. We're also announcing our funding: a $8.3M seed round led by Amplify Partners with First Round Capital and XYZ Capital participating alongside angel investors including Stewart Butterfield, John Lilly, and Mike Vernal. But first, let's start with some context. Despite decades of developer tools, development teams are still very inefficient. In 2016, we started buddybuild — a cloud-hosted, continuous integration platform for mobile apps, which was loved and used by tens of thousands of developers. Three years later, buddybuild was acquired by Apple and now lives on as Xcode Cloud.