After being the spearhead of the Croatian unicorn Infobips In his efforts to establish himself as a development organization over the past three years, Croatian entrepreneur Ivan Burazin is now on a mission to redefine developer productivity and security.
The ship that will take Burazin on this mission is called Daytona and aims to make life easier for developers and businesses. The project has been in the works for a year and is partly based on work Burazin did with his previous startup called Codeanywhere.
“Codeanywhere is a cloud-based development environment, a very different product is more of a browser-based editor. Daytona is something different – it’s basically the infrastructure underneath that runs it,” Burazin tells The Recursive.
In a nutshell, this is how Daytona works: it moves the development environment from the local machine to the cloud or a remote server. It handles the behind-the-scenes work of connecting this remote development environment to the integrated development environment (IDE), moving them up and down as needed. As a result, developers get a seamless experience and feel like they’re working locally.
Increase developer speed in organizations
The idea for Daytona was born out of necessity: Burazin and his team were receiving many calls and inquiries about a product that would solve developer and enterprise problems regarding the developer environment. So, work on the product began.
“Actually, it has nothing to do with Codeanywhere, but we like to say it’s a spiritual successor, because it’s basically the same mission we started with, which is how can we use resources cloud to increase developer speed,” says Burazin.
There are three key ways in which this system significantly improves developer productivity across the organization. The first is scalability, which addresses the common challenge of insufficient resources on developers’ laptops. Many businesses are opting for cloud hosting to create remote development environments using tools like VS Code and JetBrains.
However, this approach works for individuals or small groups of developers. Yet when dealing with hundreds or thousands of developers, it becomes a logistical nightmare: there is a lack of security audits, controls and observability, which poses significant risks when public hosting of development environments.
“It’s easy with one or two developers, but when you literally have 500 or 1,000 developers, it becomes a disaster because you need a whole DevOps team to manage the ramping up and down of development environments. You don’t have any sort of audit or security check or you don’t have any ability to observe who’s doing what, you have no idea what anything is, what anyone is doing and This can be very dangerous when you have a publicly hosted development environment. “, explains Burazin.
The second crucial aspect is security. An illustrative example is Uber, which was fined $20 million by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) due to a source code leak. This breach occurred because sensitive source code was stored on an unsecured laptop. Therefore, Uber had to introduce a solution similar to Daytona to protect its developer environments by hosting them on secure servers.
The third and final benefit is twofold, benefiting both the company and its engineers. This system allows developers to instantly create a development environment with a single click or a single line of code.
Additionally, it tackles the notorious “works on my machine” problem, a common source of frustration in software development, by ensuring consistent environments for all team members, eliminating disparities between configurations development and ensuring smoother collaboration and fewer code deployment issues.
“Engineers spend between 50 and 70 percent of their productive time on this type of debugging, which they shouldn’t have to do. This makes life easier for developers, but it also becomes more interesting for the companies themselves, because their developers are then more productive,” adds Burazin.
Lessons from the past shape Daytona’s future
Burazin also reflects on how his professional journey led him to this pivotal moment, explaining that one of the driving factors behind his current endeavor was the valuable lessons he learned from his previous experiences.
Codeanywhere taught him not to approach development tools in a conventional way; instead of building from the bottom up and targeting developers, he learned to navigate the terrain of selling to end users and enterprises.
His time at Shift honed his skills to meet the unique needs of these two markets. At Infobip, he gained insight into the inner workings of a business, an area he had never explored before.
“Finally, with Infobip, I learned a lot about working in a company because I had never done that before. My job was to take a top-down b2b company and add the bottom-up ocean to it, but also as an employee of the company. I was the buyer of other enterprise software, so now I know who I’m selling to,” Burazin tells The Recursive.
Looking ahead to the next three to four years, Burazin outlines Daytona’s vision: With the company currently in its first phase, it aims to establish itself as the go-to solution for businesses in the long term.