Debricked and Homepal: Managing Dependencies in Open Source
2020-06-15
2 min
Homepal, one of Debrickeds early adopters, is a swedish startup who “enables the digitalization of the real estate business”, as their CTO Love puts it. We decided to sit down with Love to let him tell us a little about the security challenges of a startup.
What does Homepal do?
We want to give real estate owners more power over their data and make sure nothing is stored multiple times. Most real estate companies are stuck in a complex IT-architecture which makes it difficult to get a complete overview. We provide a centralized data layer, making it easy to collect all data in one place.
What is your role in the company?
I’m the CTO of Homepal. In a startup, that entails a lot, haha. I am responsible for pretty much everything from devops to development, so I spend my days making sure that the development process runs smoothly. I deal with the servers and make sure that they are safe and working. I also plan sprints and other projects. Besides that I also do quite a bit of programming myself. So, it’s a pretty broad role!
Tell me a little bit about how Homepal works with security!
Since our whole business idea is handling data, we of course have to think a lot about security. It’s a big part of our service; being able to make our customers feel safe when making the decision to let us handle all the information they have stored. So of course it’s super important to us. We try to implement security in the development process as much as possible, to make it a part of everyday practices.
How does Debricked come into the picture?
Since I deal with everything from devops to the development processes, security has become a big part of my job. We use a lot of open source in our product and it quickly gets difficult and time consuming to keep track of all dependencies. It’s great to have the tool alert us about vulnerabilities instead of us having to research them manually. It saves us a lot of time and work! Also, it’s user friendly and doesn’t take long to get started with. We used to use NPM Audit, but when we switched to Debricked we noticed that it found a lot more vulnerabilities. It’s great being able to feel confident when importing a new library.
Lastly, tell us a little bit about the coming year. Any exciting things coming up?
We are approaching summer and will be launching a new customer in the beginning of June. So that is something that we are excited about! During the summer we will extend our team with three new team members so that is another thing that we are very excited about as well.
Homepal was founded in 2018 by engineering students at Lund university. They are now stationed in MINC in Malmö where they keep developing their service and company. Find more info about Homepal on their website.
