Swimm | Blog

StackAdapt Reports Development Productivity Boost After Implementing Swimm

Learn more about how StackAdapt is boosting developer productivity with Swimm, discovering documentation right next to the code.

StackAdapt Reports Development Productivity Boost After Implementing Swimm cover image

Announcing Season 2 of Swimm’s Podcast - Swimm Upstream

Swimm has launched the second season of Swimm Upstream for tech leaders and software engineers. Learn more about leading and navigating change within engineering organizations during this second season of Swimm Upstream.

Announcing Season 2 of Swimm’s Podcast - Swimm Upstream cover image

Time Management Tips for Developers and Engineers

Developers and engineering teams are facing increasingly stringent deadlines, and today we’re sharing some of the time management strategies we’re working with on the ground here at Swimm.

The Wet Floor Sign: Incident Management and Swimm's Platform

There are many ways to avoid repeating incidents and motivate engineering teams to document and create solutions to improve incident management. Learn how using Swimm’s platform can help to this end.

How Riskfuel is Spending 55% Less Time Onboarding New Employees With Swimm

Learn more about how Riskfuel is spending 55% less time onboarding new employees with Swimm. Swimm has been a game changer for Riskfuel.

Overcoming Git Disasters (Gitsasters) Part 2: Git Cherry-Pick, Git Revert, and Git Reflog

This is Gitsaster part 2. Apply your knowledge to various case and learn about how to use `git cherry-pick`, `git revert`, and `git reflog` if you commit to the wrong branch, push faulty commits to the remote, or lose track of an important commit.

Documentation, Dev Teams, and the Definition of Done

What is the Definition of Done (DoD), and should developer documentation be in it? It’s time for R&D leaders to take a closer look and start the conversation.

Swimm Is an Official Compass Integration Partner

We’re thrilled to announce that Swimm is an official Compass Integration Partner, making it easier for engineering and developer teams to make code-coupled documentation a part of development workflows.

Walkthrough Documentation: A Guided Tour of Your Codebase

Walkthrough documentation provides a guided tour of your codebase, both for onboarding new developers and in your team’s daily work. It’s a show stopper in terms of the value for developers and engineering teams.

The Rubber Duck Debugger: Debugging Using the Documentation Process

Learn more about Swimm’s newest Rubber Duck Debugger feature, an AI enabled bot └[ ∵ ]┘ that uses our proprietary “Debugging User Complex Keywords” technology. Using it ends up being helpful with the documentation process by documenting your thought process in coming up with a solution to the bug you are trying to fix. Worth checking out!

CEO Sync | Interview with Avi Shua - CEO and Co-Founder of Orca Security

Swimm interviewed Avi Shua, CEO and Co-Founder of Orca Security to learn more about how Avi built and created such a vibrant and successful company to detect and prioritize cloud security risks.

Developer Documenting Done Right: Why, Who, What, Where, When & How

In this high-level overview of developer documenting, we review all the major considerations and provide a starting point for planning documentation strategy.

Code Comments Vs. Documentation - Context and Code

Code comments and documentation function side-by-side at this point in time for developers and engineers alike knee-deep in code. Here’s why engineering teams need to embrace both and understand how and why they can be used together.

Onboarding Documentation for Growing Dev Teams: An Investment in Success

Creating onboarding documentation may seem like a big investment, but it pays dividends time and time again. In the 2020s, it’s truly an investment in success.

Takeaways From GitHub’s 2021 Octoverse Report: Documentation Is a Game Changer

The 2021 State of the Octoverse provides invaluable insights into developer experience and confirms what we’ve known all along: Documentation matters. Big time.

Effective Developer Feedback: A Guide for R&D Managers

Providing developers with effective feedback facilitates improvement and helps employees get acknowledged for their professional successes. Presenting a guide for R&D managers to navigate this process, both in preparing and running effective feedback meetings.

Top 20 Software Developer Conferences for 2022

If you’re mapping out your circuit for conferences in 2022, take a look at our shortlisted top 20 software developer conferences that are on our radar for the year.

IDE Integrated Documentation Using Swimm

Learn more about the advantages of IDE integrated documentation and how you can consume your documentation with Swimm's platform.

Get Started With Technical Documentation Writing Best Practices

Learn how to get started with technical documentation with these ten best practices that will help shorten new developer onboarding and get your team up to speed with your codebase.

Improving Developer Productivity on R&D Teams

Improve developer productivity on R&D teams by using the most powerful devtool, fostering a collaborative culture, and common sense action items to be productive. Most important though, is open communication among team members about productivity itself.

Rewriting History and Overcoming Git Disasters (Gitsasters) Part 1: Git Reset

Deepen your understanding of git internals and learn about overcoming “gitsasters” - git disasters where you need to go back in time and rewrite the coding history to get to the desired state.

VS Code vs. WebStorm - A Detailed Comparison

Most web developers have a clear preference for an IDE, and today we’re putting VS Code up against WebStorm to see which IDE comes out ahead.

CEO Sync | Interview with Sagi Rodin - CEO and Co-Founder of Frontegg

Swimm interviewed Sagi Rodin, CEO and Co-Founder of Frontegg to learn more about Frontegg’s user management platform and what sets them apart.

SOC 2 Compliance – A Guide for Developers

Presenting a SOC 2 compliance guide we’ve designed for developers - why it’s necessary for any service provider that stores, processes, or transmits any kind of customer information.

Docs as Code: Understanding Swimm's sw.md Markdown Format

Learn more about Swimm’s sw.md Markdown format and why everything about it makes the documentation experience easier.

End-to-End Testing: Challenges and Lessons Learned

Read about the ins and outs of End-to-End testing, including challenges, lessons, and takeaways in implementing E2E testing.

How to Use Swimm Templates

Learn about Swimm templates to help you create and edit docs that are coupled with your code.

Accelerate Your Documentation Creation: Swimm Release Notes Roundup

Check out Swimm’s roundup post of release notes including dark mode, Auto-sync, starting a Swimm document from a commit SHA, and GitHub app notificatSharing four Swimm updates from release notes versions 0.6.5 to 0.6.8

5 Code Documentation Resolutions For 2022

This year, five code documentation New Year’s resolutions to help break the documentation avoidance habit.

Swimm's Top Devtools - Our 2022 Picks

Check out Swimm’s top devtools for 2022 and how these tools have helped us gain traction in building Swimm’s platform.

How Does Swimm’s Auto-sync Feature Work?

Code refactoring shouldn’t mean engineers do work that computers can easily do. Learn how Swimm’s Auto-sync feature works, speeding up your inner dev loop and keeping your code documentation up to date.

Swimm 2021: A Year In Review

2021 was a fantastic year for Swimm. Take a look at the many exciting highlights from this past year.

Swimm Universal Playlists - As Code Coupling For Continuous Documentation

Learn more about Swimm Playlists and why it's one of the most frequently mentioned features for Swimm users.

How Swimm Selected A Payment Provider

Swimm shares their process of identifying and evaluating the best payment provider for their customers.

Introducing Swimm's New Podcast - Swimm Upstream

Swimm has launched a brand new podcast - Swimm Upstream for tech leaders and software engineers. Learn more about the first season.

The Top 10 Reasons Dev Teams Can Be Thankful This Thanksgiving

Check out the top 10 reasons dev teams can be truly thankful this Thanksgiving.

The Life of an Engineering Manager at Swimm

Find out more about what it’s like to lead and align your team as an engineering manager at Swimm.

The Ultimate Checklist for Agile Software Development

In this post, we provide the ultimate checklist for engineering departments that want to accelerate their agility. Your agile software development journey starts here!

Celebrating Swimm’s $27.6M Series A

Swimm announces $26.7M Series A funding round. Learn more about what’s next for Swimm from CEO Oren Toledano.

How I Onboarded Remotely with Swimm… to Swimm

Itai Katz, Principal Software Engineer, is sharing his story and how he onboarded remotely with Swimm after moving from New York to Berlin. Here’s how some team rituals and tools helped him become an integral part of the team and jump right into the codebase.

Get Started with Swimm: Frequently Asked Questions

Swimm Q&A to help you get started.

Feeding the Beast - Writing Tasty Dev Tasks

Is your task backlog getting packed? Is it getting hard to manage priorities? Maybe the problem is with how well your development tasks are being "cooked"! Tasks repeatedly overspilling from one sprint to another causing you to miss the deadlines can be avoided by the way you write out (or cook) tasks.

Optimizing Product Growth with Product Analytics

Product analytics help you make data-driven decisions. Here’s how we implemented Heap at Swimm and what early stage startups should do with product usage analytics & insights.

Continuous Documentation Through Continuous Integration with Swimm

Continuous integration is a practice that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster, with a high degree of safety, through constant testing and validation of new and changed code. Swimm works to ensure that your documentation is equally vetted, and remains in-sync with your code. Add Swimm to your CI to make sure your docs are always synced with your code.

Integrating Swimm and Continuous Documentation Into Your Workflow

Teams can be very guarded when it comes to potential impact to their workflow. We describe a goals-oriented approach to planning your shift to continuous documentation through continuous integration that helps everyone visualize and feel comfortable about the changes through a smooth, gradual transition.

Advanced Documentation Editor: how to create code-coupled docs in seconds

Swimm’s fluid documentation editor helps you keep your inner dev loop running quickly and smoothly while still keeping your documentation in sync and comprehensive. With most things not requiring your hands to leave the keyboard, you can crank out beautiful documentation built right on your code.

Swimm's IDE Plugins Brings Knowledge To Your Engineers In Time

Code documentation will always fail if engineers can’t find it when they need it. Swimm’s IDE plugins help engineers find the right amount of information exactly when they need it, and work hand-in-hand with well commented code to make sure knowledge can be discovered.

What is Continuous Documentation? The Manifesto Part I

Documentation quickly becomes stale as code changes. Continuous documentation focuses on ensuring documentation remains up-to-date and usable as the code changes. Check out our very own Omer Rosenbaum about Continuous Documentation!

Get to know Swimm Users: the Hunters Dev Team

Bringing to you our user case studies, examples of how developer teams across the globe use Swimm to build up knowledge and ship code as efficiently as possible.

The Four Main Documentation Strategies Explained

The ways that documentation is created stem from a combination of four main documentation strategies. Breadth-first and Depth-first approaches are the most widely known, but documenting common tasks or simply answering the most common questions is also very effective.

Microservices Architecture Guide: Four Things To Consider Prior To Migration

Microservice architecture can help you solve real problems for your users much more rapidly and robustly than monolithic patterns, but there are many things to consider including switching from well-documented code to no documentation as complexities go up exponentially.

Happy Birthday Swimm - A Letter from the CEO

It’s September 2019, and 4 co-founders met with a bunch of lawyers, signed a few papers, and a few days later on September 18th, **Swimm was born!**

The Ultimate Tech Podcasts From Our R&D Team to Yours

There are so many tech podcasts out there these days - it's hard to know where to start. Sharing today our list of favorite tech podcasts for developers.

Documentation Strategies for Busy People

Whether you don't have time, or just hate writing, we've got some ideas that can help you get your documentation written.

Accessible & Discoverable Knowledge Promotes Inclusive Teams

Don't rely on situational circumstances to convey essential knowledge to new hires; make the path deliberate and equally valuable to those that learn on their own, and those that learn best in groups. Present everyone with the same breadth of knowledge so that everyone knows what there is to learn, and let them learn in a way that works best for them.

Coffee Decoded

Coffee Decoded is a series of blog posts interviewing the Swimm Dev team on their top tips for users aiming to also offer an opportunity to get to know the team more personally.

Swimm + IntelliJ - Announcing the Dynamic Documentation Duo

Swimm now supports the consumption of Swimm-created documentation within any IntelliJ IDE.

New Fluid Editor With Image Tools, Azure DevOps Integration - 0.5.0 Is A Waterfall of Major New Features

Swimm 0.5.0 is a major release, featuring a significantly improved fluid editing experience with new image tools, a faster and more fluid snippet selection workflow and support for Azure DevOps Pipelines!

The Hidden Value of Code Documentation: A Success Factor for M&A

Companies acquire other tech companies for their customer base, code or talent. While sometimes the acquired company keeps operating as an autonomous unit, more often than not a technological integration is required. Read more about how code documentation can become the secret sauce to winning M&As in 2021.

Check Out 0.4.8: Performance Upgrades, New Snippet Gallery Drawer and Gitlab Integrations

0.4.8 Comes with much improved snippet selection through the Snippet Studio Drawer, Gitlab Integration and Numerous Performance Upgrades. We're relentless when it comes to removing friction in documentation.

Join Us off the High Dive to Take a Look at 0.4.6!

Join us off the high dive to take a look at some amazing things in Swimm 0.4.6! We’ve got something called Smart Text and it’s going to markedly improve the quality of life for documentation maintainers during refactoring & cool down cycles.

Welcome to 0.4.5!

0.4.5 Cannonballs in with a great new left-nav, Git submodule support, better smart paths and more! Come check out the release notes.

Rubber Duck Debugging & How to Use It in Documentation

“Rubber Duck Debugging” is a fun way to structure the flood of unordered thoughts we experience as we investigate strange problems. Turns out, it’s also a fantastic way to provide the structure we need to write effective documentation.

Release Notes - Dive Into 0.4.4

Autocomplete From Snippets, Markdown Export & More - Dive Into 0.4.4! This version implements many improvements to the flow of creating your documentation, making sure it stays in sync, and even easier to read, right where you need it!

How Venn Covered All Documentation Bases for Onboarding New Developers

A special interview with Engineering Manager, Barak Drechsler. >> With $40 million raised in 2019, Venn committed to expand its R&D capabilities. Learn how they are investing in codebase knowledge sharing for new team members >>

How To Artfully Dive Out Of Documentation Deficit And Into Continuous Documentation

We know that the lack of documentation coverage is debt that we need to pay down, but we tend to rationalize delaying it. Clues to what to prioritize can be found by running call graphs and debug log analysis, while a goal-oriented approach helps make shorter work of the writing process. Swimm is a tool that, out of the box, helps with all of this.

Why Continuous Documentation is crucial for scaling teams

Teams work hard to create pipelines that do most of the repetitive work automatically, reducing the cognitive load of software and infrastructure engineers. Continuous integration and automation are key aspects of high-performing DevOps environments. What about continuous documentation?

How Orca Made Remote Onboarding Work for Engineers

A special interview with Yoav Alon, Chief Technology Officer at Orca Security.

Release Notes - Introducing Version 0.4.0

0.4.0 is our fourth major version release which focused on creating the best experience for developers to start documenting code. Main features included an overhaul of the app structure and the Workspace, Separation of Docs and Exercises, Syncing text with code using slash "/" commands and more.

Release Notes 0.3.8 - Text Blocks, Playlist Editor and Snippet Studio Upgrade

In this Swimm Heat (weekly sprint) we focused on adding the Playlist editor, with an update to the snippet studio experience.

How to Find the Right Code Knowledge Management Tool

Guest blog by Shay Nehmad, VP R&D at a stealth-mode startup and previously tech lead at Guardicore, lists 4 requirements to look out for in a good code knowledge management tool.

Software Development Knowledge Sharing Methods Are Broken: Here’s Why

8 knowledge sharing methods for software development teams and the challenges they present. Read about a new knowledge management vision for code proficiency.

Release Notes 0.3.4 - Advanced Permissions, Synced Units View, and More

The synced units status page is here and we are very pleased to introduce it as it shines light on one of our core features, the Auto-sync. In this version you will be able to easily see and fix all outdated Units. Also, we added a new onboarding module along with pre-populated content to demonstrate what can be created with Swimm. Jump in and check for updates!

Sync Don't Sink: Why We Built Swimm for Dev Teams

After officially announcing our seed round, here are our goals for 2021.

Engineering Metrics to Increase Developer Productivity

Watching out for these productivity metrics will improve quality of code, time to market and customer satisfaction, as well as do good for the team.

Why We Switched From GitHub Issues to Jira to ClickUp

Swimm used and tested three product management tools: GitHub, Jira, and ClickUp. Read the pros and cons and when to use each one for software product development.

The Perils of Remotely Onboarding to a New Codebase

Almost 80% of developers were already working remotely to some extent prior to Covid-19, and providing healthy coding habits rather than backlog tasks will set high team standards and a safety net for new developers.

Supabase: Get started With Vue

Supabase launches its Beta today. Use Swimm to learn more about how to use Supabase with VUE.

Infection Monkey Tutorial: Start Contributing using Swimm

Infection Monkey, powered by Guardicore, was featured extensively in Swimm’s Open Source Contributor Summit. Shay Nehmad, and Shreya Malviya, a contributor to Infection Monkey, spoke to the participants about how Swimm is making it easier to contribute to the project and make a difference.

Recent Study: 7 Onboarding Best Practices You Should Apply Now

Researchers show how to improve the developer employee onboarding process. See how

7 Open Source Solutions To Optimize Your DevOps Pipeline

These are the Open Source projects we recommend watching and contributing to this Hacktoberfest, to optimize your DevOps pipeline.

4 Ways to Improve Developer Onboarding to Your Open Source Project

OS Maintainers? this read is for you.

The Method We Used to Define Our Core Values

Why was it important we choose our company values at such an early stage and how? The discovery process we implemented was unique, quick and extremely rewarding, and is shared in detail in this post.

Should CTOs Outsource Commercial Website Development?

Here at Swimm, we developed the website inhouse and served a completely static site with the perks of developing with Vue. So we chose NuxtJS and added a content management layer using Netlify CMS. However, there are several consideration to keep in mind when deciding who will develop the commercial website, here is how to choose.

Onboarding Open Source: 5 Things You Can Do Today

If you're looking to getting into open source, here are the basic actions you can take to develop your open source skills and ensure you’re making the most out of what this field has to offer to you.

Vue vs React: Best Choice for Startups

“I just have one question for you: Why Vue? I hope you're not rolling your eyes thinking - “ah no, another question about Vue”.

A Hands-On Intro to Git Internals: Creating a Repo From Scratch

Diving deep under the hood of Git Internals, we will create (drum roll… 🥁) a repo from scratch and see the wonders of the plumbing beneath porcelain.

Why We Chose Node.js Over Python for Our Product

Goodbye Python my Old Friend: How several demos with our first clients, revealed some major gaps we did not anticipate when starting off with Python.

The Ultimate Guide for Hackathon Success

Community perks: If you’re participating in a hackathon or organizing one, read this guide! We organized a successful hackathon a few months ago and turned our insights into a post

What Every Manager Must Know About Developer Happiness

"You can’t expect developers to fight your most important battles and not to truly and meaningfully invest in them."

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up: How to Deep Dive Into a Codebase

Choosing the right approach, and why it’s actually a big deal

Weekly Deep Dev: Trending Pains and Why You Should Care

Gleaned from the twitter mines this week, trending pains on mentoring and onboarding brought to you with a dash of humor.

What can "Whiplash" Teach Us About Engineer Mentorship

Op-Ed by Tom Ahi Dror, Co-Founder & CBO at Swimm

Creating Effective and Sustainable Tutorials for your Dev Team

If your onboarding tutorials do not meet the following criteria - you probably shouldn’t bother creating them in the first place.

Why We Started Swimm: Rethinking Engineer Onboarding

An Op-ed article by Swimm's CEO.

Professionalism by Forming a Team Habit

While branded photogenic team building activities are common in many tech companies — especially with rapidly growing teams, this strategy fails to help grow together as professionals and misses the aim in the long run.

Why Most Mentors are Doomed to Fail

While we mostly hear about the “Sink or Swim” approach in regards to new engineers, the truth is, experienced mentors (or 'buddies') are also commonly treated this way - and this in-fact, is the core problem of engineer onboarding.

The End to Pseudo Onboarding: Your Engineers Will Thank You

Getting Engineer onboarding right will get your new hires to solve issues and merge pull requests from day one.

On the Verge of a New Codebase: 5 Smart Moves to Make When Starting a New Job

"I would like to shift the focus to new developers, to you - new hires - and share in this post some tips on how to win onboarding."

The Swimm Blog

StackAdapt Reports Development Productivity Boost After Implementing Swimm

Announcing Season 2 of Swimm’s Podcast - Swimm Upstream

Time Management Tips for Developers and Engineers

The Wet Floor Sign: Incident Management and Swimm's Platform

How Riskfuel is Spending 55% Less Time Onboarding New Employees With Swimm

Overcoming Git Disasters (Gitsasters) Part 2: Git Cherry-Pick, Git Revert, and Git Reflog

Documentation, Dev Teams, and the Definition of Done

Swimm Is an Official Compass Integration Partner

Walkthrough Documentation: A Guided Tour of Your Codebase

The Rubber Duck Debugger: Debugging Using the Documentation Process

CEO Sync | Interview with Avi Shua - CEO and Co-Founder of Orca Security

Developer Documenting Done Right: Why, Who, What, Where, When & How

Code Comments Vs. Documentation - Context and Code

Onboarding Documentation for Growing Dev Teams: An Investment in Success

Takeaways From GitHub’s 2021 Octoverse Report: Documentation Is a Game Changer

Effective Developer Feedback: A Guide for R&D Managers

Top 20 Software Developer Conferences for 2022

IDE Integrated Documentation Using Swimm

Get Started With Technical Documentation Writing Best Practices

Improving Developer Productivity on R&D Teams

Rewriting History and Overcoming Git Disasters (Gitsasters) Part 1: Git Reset

VS Code vs. WebStorm - A Detailed Comparison

CEO Sync | Interview with Sagi Rodin - CEO and Co-Founder of Frontegg

SOC 2 Compliance – A Guide for Developers

Docs as Code: Understanding Swimm's sw.md Markdown Format

End-to-End Testing: Challenges and Lessons Learned

How to Use Swimm Templates

Accelerate Your Documentation Creation: Swimm Release Notes Roundup

5 Code Documentation Resolutions For 2022

Swimm's Top Devtools - Our 2022 Picks

How Does Swimm’s Auto-sync Feature Work?

Swimm 2021: A Year In Review

Swimm Universal Playlists - As Code Coupling For Continuous Documentation

How Swimm Selected A Payment Provider

Introducing Swimm's New Podcast - Swimm Upstream

The Top 10 Reasons Dev Teams Can Be Thankful This Thanksgiving

The Life of an Engineering Manager at Swimm

The Ultimate Checklist for Agile Software Development

Celebrating Swimm’s $27.6M Series A

How I Onboarded Remotely with Swimm… to Swimm

Get Started with Swimm: Frequently Asked Questions

Feeding the Beast - Writing Tasty Dev Tasks

Optimizing Product Growth with Product Analytics

Continuous Documentation Through Continuous Integration with Swimm

Integrating Swimm and Continuous Documentation Into Your Workflow

Advanced Documentation Editor: how to create code-coupled docs in seconds

Swimm's IDE Plugins Brings Knowledge To Your Engineers In Time

What is Continuous Documentation? The Manifesto Part I

Get to know Swimm Users: the Hunters Dev Team

The Four Main Documentation Strategies Explained

Microservices Architecture Guide: Four Things To Consider Prior To Migration

Happy Birthday Swimm - A Letter from the CEO

The Ultimate Tech Podcasts From Our R&D Team to Yours

Documentation Strategies for Busy People

Accessible & Discoverable Knowledge Promotes Inclusive Teams

Coffee Decoded

Swimm + IntelliJ - Announcing the Dynamic Documentation Duo

New Fluid Editor With Image Tools, Azure DevOps Integration - 0.5.0 Is A Waterfall of Major New Features

The Hidden Value of Code Documentation: A Success Factor for M&A

Check Out 0.4.8: Performance Upgrades, New Snippet Gallery Drawer and Gitlab Integrations

Join Us off the High Dive to Take a Look at 0.4.6!

Welcome to 0.4.5!

Rubber Duck Debugging & How to Use It in Documentation

Release Notes - Dive Into 0.4.4

How Venn Covered All Documentation Bases for Onboarding New Developers

How To Artfully Dive Out Of Documentation Deficit And Into Continuous Documentation

Why Continuous Documentation is crucial for scaling teams

How Orca Made Remote Onboarding Work for Engineers

Release Notes - Introducing Version 0.4.0

Release Notes 0.3.8 - Text Blocks, Playlist Editor and Snippet Studio Upgrade

How to Find the Right Code Knowledge Management Tool

Software Development Knowledge Sharing Methods Are Broken: Here’s Why

Release Notes 0.3.4 - Advanced Permissions, Synced Units View, and More

Sync Don't Sink: Why We Built Swimm for Dev Teams

Engineering Metrics to Increase Developer Productivity

Why We Switched From GitHub Issues to Jira to ClickUp

The Perils of Remotely Onboarding to a New Codebase

Supabase: Get started With Vue

Infection Monkey Tutorial: Start Contributing using Swimm