When we were coming up in tech, nearly 20 years ago now, software performance seemed like magic. We weren’t aware of many developers doing benchmarking or making software faster, and those that were built their own tools and seemed to hold the know-how for doing things properly as a closely guarded secret which was far more art than science.

Fast forward to today and things have changed a lot. For one, developers have really internalized the mantra “Don’t write your own benchmarking framework”. We now have lots of choice, whether you’re using Java and JMH, C++ and Google’s benchmark library, or .NET and BenchmarkDotNet, most of the time none of us need to write benchmark libraries from scratch. And thanks to Youtube we have easy access to excellent lectures on applied math for the performance of distributed systems. We’ve also got more books, more conferences, more workshops, and more communities for staying up to date with the latest developments in software performance.

And yet, there are lots of ways things could be better. It’s still difficult for developers to get started and difficult for busy teams to learn the necessary skills to test the performance of their software. Those who are assigned to do such testing, struggle to get reliable, repeatable results on the one hand, and don’t have the arsenal of math concepts and tools to deal with the inevitable variation present in any non-trivial real world system. We don’t teach performance skills to undergrads or as part of coding bootcamps, and even senior developers need to spend hours and hours learning how to not get stung by common performance mistakes. It’s 2024 and we have amazing developer tools, but we still haven’t gravitated onto a common set of tools, across languages and runtimes, for automatically analysing benchmark results.

And this is what we’ve set out to change at Nyrkiö. We want to make the best performance tools available to every developer. We want to create a company that shares decades of experience with performance projects and acts as a catalyst for teams in need of benchmarking and optimisation knowledge via consulting. And we’re going to do all of this the same way we’ve worked for our entire careers: with open source at the center of everything.

Bringing change point detection to everyone

I’ve worked on a few benchmark analysis systems over the years (this is Matt, by the way). But it wasn’t until talking with my co-founder, Henrik, in Feb 2020 about the paper he co-authored on using Change Point Detection for identifying performance changes that I felt like I’d witnessed a step change. The phrase “game changer” gets thrown around a lot, but I truly believe that using Change Point Detection as part of your performance testing pipeline is currently the best way to detect regressions quickly and avoid issues slipping through to your users. It works reliably with noisy benchmark data and we’re starting to see more and more companies implement CPD to detect performance changes.

Henrik and I co-wrote a follow up paper in 2023 and our team released Hunter as an open source project. This code is now used in companies like DataStax, TigerBeetle, and Confluent and there’s a growing open source community around it.

We want to accelerate that adoption which is why we’ve released the Nyrkiö platform! Nyrkiö is an easy to use SaaS version of the same change detection that Hunter does on the command line. By making change detection easy to adopt in your CI pipelines, we hope to make automated performance testing so mainstream that every developer can identify a commit that caused a performance change with a few clicks in a matter of minutes. And without needing to build or manage a collection of benchmarking and analysis tools themselves.

Open source by default

Both of us have built our careers in open source. We strongly believe that ideas are stronger when they’re shared openly and challenged. We’ve both been maintainers of open source projects and convinced our employers to release projects as open source. Therefore Nyrkiö isn’t just a commercial service we put in front of a promising open source command line tool. Everything we built so far at nyrkiö.com is itself available in our github repo, under the Apache Software License 2.0

Tightly coupled with our belief in sharing knowledge and code is our belief in transparency – even our pricing model for Nyrkiö is available to read in the source code.

Remote first

We’ve always loved the fact that open source projects are developed by people all around the world. Smart and talented people live everywhere around our globe, and it’s always a pleasure and a privilege when we get tocollaborate on meaningful software projects, and forge long lasting friendships.

In open source projects your peers can be anywhere in the world and we wanted to embed that philosophy in the DNA of our company. 

Bootstrapped

Finally, at this stage of our life we wanted to fund this company ourselves, without outside investment. That’s not to say this won’t change in the future, but for now we want the autonomy and control that can only come from bootstrapping a company. This means that in addition to building and offering the Nyrkiö platform, we also consult on performance-related projects.

Thank you

There is no way we’d be here today without the help and support of our friends, colleagues in various communities, and of course our customers. Me and Henrik want to say a big thank you to everyone that’s supported, encouraged, and sharpened our thinking as we were getting our company off the ground. There is so much more to come.

For faster software!

Matt & Henrik