Press Release

The Snaplet VS Code Extension has been deprecated

November 16, 2023

We've phased out the Snaplet VS Code extension to put all our energy and focus into making the Snaplet CLI and core product the best they can be. Thanks for sticking with us!

No more PII in the sky - Snaplet launches a (fun) database tool

Berlin startup launches a database snapshot tool that removes personally identifiable data for developers.

Berlin, Germany
July 2, 2021

Software startup, Snaplet Inc. announced the beta launch of their database snapshot tool on Wednesday. Snaplet is a software tool for developers that creates copies of production databases with mock data for usage during development or testing.

“When working with companies, I noticed what a pain it is for developers to get a realistic database snapshot from clients, to use for development and testing. Cleaning up and transforming sensitive data is time-consuming and laborious. It's hard to maintain and you end up with large datasets that need to be continuously downloaded. This process is such a tedious task, that many developers end up downloading production databases onto their local machines, which, if the database contains personal information, is considered illegal. With Snaplet, we want to change that.” - Peter Pistorius, cofounder.

“I find databases very interesting in the software development life cycle because there’s something that we don’t have a lot of developer tools for. One thing that I’ve seen, in every company that I’ve worked at–including GitHub, is how difficult it is to work with databases in development. When you run a Seed on a database, it’s very difficult to keep it close to the data you really want. It’s impossible to debug problems. It’s usually a minimal set of data, so you’re not dealing with a lot of performance issues, and it’s very hard to keep up-to-date. One of the things that Peter (the co-creator of RedwoodJs) and I are trying to solve, is to help make working with development data a little bit easier” - Scott Chacon, cofounder.

"Essentially, Snaplet identifies sensitive data (PII) in a database and makes it quick and easy to replace the PII fields with mock data. Also, a developer can eliminate unnecessary table data and take Snapshots of only essential production data, which saves them time and space. The snapshots contain a mock version of the original cloud-hosted database, which can then be restored to a development machine through the Snaplet CLI (command line interface). This makes testing much easier and safer for developers who work with databases that contain sensitive personal information." - Barbara Cilliers, design & marketing team.

"I think what we've hopefully managed to do is, create a tool that is not only helpful but also enjoyable to use because we put a playful spin on it in terms of the user interface (UI) and branding. Something that seemed like a huge pain to do before, is now relatively quick and easy, and even a little bit entertaining." - Almarie Stander, design & marketing team.

About Snaplet

Snaplet Inc. is a software as a service company headquartered in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in 2021 by GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon (current CEO of Chatterbug, and co-founderof SCNE) and Peter Pistorius (co-creator of RedwoodJS).

Snaplet copies a production database, transforming personal information so that developers can safely code against actual data. We want to be the first tool that developers think about when dealing with data at scale. Be that whilst copying, generating, sharing, transforming, debugging or migrating data.

To learn more, visit www.snaplet.dev

Peter Pistorius: peter@snaplet.dev

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