In 2019 our founders were consulting on a distributed payments platform, spending more time in log files than in code. The tracing tools of the day demanded cloud accounts, sampled away the interesting requests, and rendered everything in a browser tab three context-switches away from the terminal.

So we built a tracer that ran locally, rendered flame graphs in the terminal, and sampled with rules you could commit to the repo. Colleagues asked for it. Then their friends did. NexusTrace was open-sourced six months later, and DevNexus Tools Ltd was incorporated in 2020.

DriftAPI came from watching a client ship a breaking API change on a Friday. ForgeKit came from maintaining nine SDKs by hand for a single product. Relay came from an internal tool our own engineers refused to give up. Every product we ship solves a problem we lived through.