Fiddler—A Segue

In September 2012, Telerik completed the acquisition of the Fiddler Web Debugger, and I announced that I would join Telerik to upgrade my side project to my full-time job.

It’s been a busy three years, as we evolved Fiddler from version 2.4.1 to 4.6.2—the changelog alone grew by 1701 entries as we added dozens of major features, hundreds of tweaks, and thousands of fixes. Nearly every line has been touched, and performance and functionality have been improved throughout. We brought Fiddler to Linux, simplified running it in a VM on a Mac and worked to ensure that it remains compatible with all of the latest-version mobile platforms and desktop browsers, including Microsoft Edge. I was able to make long-awaited improvements in areas like Image Analysis, WebSocket inspection, API Testing, extensibility, UI customization, PCAP import and many more. In my off-hours, I even released a Second Edition of my best-selling book “Debugging with Fiddler.” Perhaps most rewarding of all, I had the opportunity to interact with thousands of customers via issue reports, and speak to thousands more at conferences and webinars.

Telerik has honored its commitment to keep Fiddler for Windows available for free, even as we introduced a new fully-supported commercial offering that allows companies to build Fiddler-like functionality into their applications via the FiddlerCore class library.

Behind the scenes, many engineering process improvements were introduced. We migrated from “xcopy-to-NAS source control” to a private repo on GitHub. A Jenkins CI server was introduced to catch build breaks across our many targets (Windows v2, Window v4, FiddlerCore v2, v3, and v4), and we added unit tests for critical functionality. Issue tracking moved from a pile of scrawled napkins to tagged and prioritized GitHub issues, and code-signing was upgraded to use a hardware token.

While I love features more than anything else, it’s these engineering process improvements that give me the confidence that Telerik will be able to continue to improve Fiddler as I move on to pursue an exciting opportunity outside the company in 2016.

I had no idea what I was signing up for when I released the first build of Fiddler almost thirteen years ago—it’s been an incredible adventure, and it’s time for a change. While I expect to remain involved in the Fiddler community via ongoing updates to the Fiddler book, hopping in to answer questions on StackOverflow & the forum and building useful extensions, I’ll pass the development baton to my colleagues at Telerik who have been building indispensable tools and controls for developers since 2002. I’m excited to see what’s coming next—projects like Telerik Platform, Telerik® Kendo UI® and NativeScript all have some pretty fantastic plans for 2016 that I think you’ll enjoy.

Thanks for everything, and happy holidays!

-Eric Lawrence