On Dynamic Observability and Team Culture with Liran Haimovitch, Rookout CTO

Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Liran Haimovitch and I have been programming both as a hobby, and professionally, for over 20 years.

The first decade of my career was spent in the cybersecurity space as a researcher, developer, and an engineering leader. That is where I developed my deep passion to understand how computers actually work- from the bare metal all the way to the latest and greatest technologies.

Today, I take great pride in bringing those insights with me into everything I do.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

I’m the Co-Founder and CTO of Rookout, a platform that empowers engineers to see into their code with Dynamic Observability.

Rookout allows developers to get any piece of information from your code as it’s running in any production or non-production environment. Rookout provides the capability to collect variable values, stack traces, and more, all without having to write any code, redeploy, or even restart your application.

What is the origin story?

Mary Poppendieck famously asked, "How long would it take your organization to deploy a change that involves just one single line of code?”

This question is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, work on your CI/CD pipeline as blazingly fast as possible and deploy in a shorter time frame. On the other hand, figure out how to do more without having to resort to writing a line of code.

Thinking back on our own experiences and those of our colleagues, we have all spent a great amount of time and effort on just getting that additional log line in place on the right server so that we are able to get a piece of data and maybe, just maybe, fix that bug. That’s why we created Rookout: to be able to do just that, without the waste of time, effort, and resources.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

How well do you understand the inner workings of your favorite operating system and development language? Whether it surprises you or not, not everybody looks too deep beneath the surface.

The team at Rookout has that exact passion for figuring out how stuff works, how to take everything apart, and how to put it all back together. That’s what makes the team not only so amazing, but helps them to work together so well and continuously strive for bigger and better, together.

Every day at our office our team ponders one single question: how can we bend the rules of the Matrix to get you the data you need on the fly?

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

For years I have been working at a large organization and I feel that’s something I excel in. However, nothing beats the freedom of building your own startup.

I’m sure I would have a lot more free time to travel, trek, and hike. Though maybe not during the pandemic...

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

As an emerging company, nothing beats revenues to know you are bringing real value to your customers AND that they are willing to pay for it.

In addition to that, we focus heavily on measuring how developers are using our products and spend a lot of time to make sure they have the best possible experience and get the most value out of it.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

About a year ago, we launched a new hybrid SaaS approach. Using this architecture, our customers can utilize our SaaS platform without sharing any data with us.

Since then, some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies have deployed Rookout in their production environments.

This has been a huge benefit for us, both for showing the importance of the problem we are solving and for validating the security posture of our solution.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Over the past few months, we have been hard at work porting our technology to support native languages such as C++, Golang, and Rust.

While using bytecode manipulation to instrument high-level applications is no small feat, moving to live assembly rewriting is a whole new ball game.

I can’t wait to see this deployed in production!

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Ironically enough, high-quality tech news is becoming a bit of a scarcity.

Hacker Noon provides a single place with (almost) all the reading materials I need to keep up to date.

Being able to read anonymously and freely is a huge benefit, and sponsored content is kept in check in a transparent manner.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Within the field of programming and software, the value of communications is on a meteoric rise.

Having a deep understanding of technology and being a super coder has immense value. However, being able to articulate it, both verbally and in writing, has 10x that value.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Product Led Growth (PLG) is all the buzz where it comes to tech startups these days.

In certain segments, such as production-first developer tools, PLG can take an odd shape sometimes.

If you are interested in learning more about what it looks like at Rookout, sign up and check it out!