Sidekick ❤️ VSCode

Sidekick ❤️ VSCode! We are excited to announce the VSCode extension of Sidekick which will make your life easier. 

This extension enables you to debug applications remotely from the comfort of your IDE. With this extension, you can build faster by resolving the issues in pre-production & production using the exact real data.

Wait, what is live debugging?

Live debugging is simply a debugging technique done remotely without impacting the application execution; because it involves connecting your local IDE with a server running somewhere else.

Live debugging tools connect your live production environment to your codebase, to the code you see in your IDE. On the software end, it offers a live debugging library for your production environment that tracks which line your software currently executes and checks the state of all variables. On the IDE end, after installing an extension, it lets you set tracepoints—the live debugging equivalent of breakpoints in traditional debugging. While breakpoints stop execution at a specific line of code, tracepoints take a snapshot of the state of your system at that line and do not stop the execution of your application.

Ok, why would I need it?

Well, this is a pretty valid question. Software teams lose time, effort, and money while debugging bugs in production environments as well as testing, staging, or even development environments.

Reproducing an issue is mostly a painful and daunting process if your application runs on the cloud. First you have to take the hassle of recreating the production environment in your local machine. This is often time-consuming and not so accurate because you can not debug the issue with the actual data. You have to mock the resources your application works with. In order to come through this, you generally drawn in data. Which means you often get lost in the massive amounts of log piles and so.

At this point Sidekick comes to rescue because you do not have to recreate your cloud environment in your local. You can debug your cloud applications independent of wherever they run without replicating the entire application on your local machine. It enables you to debug issues where they occur, with the actual data, dramatically reducing time to resolution. You can collect the relevant data required to debug issues when they occur rather than getting lost in log piles.

I want to use it but my data is sensitive!

No worries at all! Sidekick is secure by design.

First and foremost, Sidekick provides an on-prem deployment option which you can deploy it on your own cloud instances. This way no data is transferred out of your environments and it keeps you 100% secure.

Using Sidekick’s SaaS version, your code never gets transferred to Sidekick servers. IDE retrieves code from git repositories and stores it in your local. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest. Sensitive data can be redacted at the agent, and not leave the application.

Let’s get started

If you’ve read so far, it means you might somehow be convinced to take a look at what Sidekick offers. If you use VSCode IDE and code in Python or NodeJS languages, here is the getting started guide for you. 

Sidekick also supports Java fellas who use IntelliJ IDEA IDE for development. Let me leave the documentation link for those friends too.

TL;DR

This is the part I usually check before starting to read any blog post :) Here’s a piece of condensed information about what this article is about for those of you who are like me.

Sidekick is a live debugging tool where you can debug your running applications while they keep on running. To be more precise, Sidekick provides the ability to put non-breaking breakpoints in your application code which captures the snapshot of the application state, the call stack, variables, etc.

You can find Sidekick on the VisualStudio Marketplace from this link.

Your time to resolution, developer productivity, and cost efficiency will boost up with Sidekick. C’mon sign up now and give it a try!

You can always reach out to us through our contact us page, Twitter, and by joining our Discord community.