Who

Hi, my name is Christoph Dorn and I am a tool maker.

Why

DeveloperCompanion is the result of many years of yearning for a unified methodology and open toolsuite that addresses some fundamental issues in software development especially as it relates to open source software.

I am building DeveloperCompanion for my own use and having a desire to make a positive impact on the lives of fellow PHP and JavaScript developers I am building a community around it in the hope that others will find it as useful as I do.

Mission

My mission has become to make you, the developer highly, efficient in working with open source based software and data formats. To start with this will be based on the philosophy, experience and tools I have come to rely on. Long term it will be based on the collective contributions of all users.

What

DeveloperCompanion is a tool container that runs alongside your existing toolchain and development methodology. Via pluggable tools it tries to help you by providing insight into and control over all aspects of your projects such as project management, bug tracking, debugging, documentation, monitoring and so on all in one place.

DeveloperCompanion is constantly evolving and will offer an open extension system allowing anyone to contribute new functionality. This aspect will be released once I have had a chance to learn more about how this needs to work.

For now I will be releasing one tool at a time the pace of which will depend on how quickly each new tool stabilizes. As the extension system is rolled out anyone will be able to release and maintain tools. Long-term the same tools that run within DeveloperCompanion will be able to run on an MIT licensed stack in any environment you choose.

How

I care about how the tools I use are built. I have strong opinions about open architectures, data formats, APIs and extensibility. Everything I do is a reflection of that including DeveloperCompanion.

To make a long story short I believe the major factor constraining software evolution is the lack of refactorability as a core design goal of toolchains. I did not want to fall prey to this problem as I evolve DeveloperCompanion so after too many hours to count of experimenting and designing over a decade I ended up taking one year to write a new toolchain platform that addresses the issue of refactorability at its core.

All technologies underlying DeveloperCompanion are or will be open source licensed and will be highlighted as the extension system evolves. Making DeveloperCompanion customizable in a maintainable way is a core goal and will receive significant attention.