near-term
More ecosystems. Webhook-driven graph updates so changes appear in seconds. Deeper artifact-consumer views. A polished team-collaboration layer.
about / 00
Built because the same problem
kept showing up at every project.
Riftmap exists to make infrastructure dependencies visible, current, and self-maintaining — across every ecosystem an engineering team actually uses. No catalog to fill in. No tribal knowledge to replace when the person who knew it leaves.
origin / 01
Self-experienced problem.
I'm a Software and DevOps engineer. Across years of consulting engagements, personal projects, and conversations with other engineers, the same problem kept surfacing: someone updates a base image, a Terraform module, or a CI template — and three hours later Teams or Slack is on fire because nobody knew what depended on what.
I looked for a tool that actually mapped cross-repository, cross-language dependencies and showed what consumed what. Renovate kept versions updated but didn't show consumers. Backstage needed humans to maintain a catalog that went stale within weeks. HCP Terraform Explorer only handled Terraform. Nothing covered the real shape of the problem.
The deeper I looked, the clearer it became: parsing ten ecosystems, resolving cross-registry references, handling incremental updates, keeping a graph fast at 500+ repos — this wasn't a weekend script. It was a product.
Before committing seriously, I wanted to test whether this was really a widespread problem or just one I kept running into. I posted in r/devops and r/terraform. 86 comments and 35,000 views later, the answer was clear — and the strongest signal wasn't the complaints. Six independent engineers replied saying they'd also built their own version. Each solved part of the problem for their own team. None of them had productised it.
Riftmap is what happens when that pattern gets finished instead of abandoned.
who / 02
Daniel Westgaard.
Founder, builder, person you'll actually talk to.
Software and DevOps engineer based in Norway. Day job: programming, development, automation and platform engineering consulting at a European IT consultancy firm. Riftmap is my independent venture, operated under Westgaard Technologies — built on evenings and weekends until it earns the right to be more.
You'll talk to me if you have questions. There's no support queue, no tier-one deflection, no "we'll pass this to the team." The opinions in the product are mine, and so are the decisions about what ships next. That's a feature, not a compromise — it's why Riftmap is opinionated instead of configurable. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or just questions, please feel free to reach out.
principles / 03
How I build.
Riftmap has "strong" opinions. Some are unusual. Stating them publicly keeps the product honest and tells the right customers they're in the right place.
- 01
Deterministic first, AI later.
Riftmap parses your source files with static analysis — no LLM in the critical path, no hallucinated edges. AI is on the roadmap for summarisation and explanation, never for dependency discovery.
- 02
No catalog to maintain.
The moment a tool requires humans to keep a YAML file current, it's already wrong. Dependencies are parsed from the files that already define them.
- 03
Self-hosted in the architecture from day one.
The initial focus is SaaS for engineering orgs where shipping fast matters more than sovereignty. But I've consulted at Norwegian government agencies where nothing can leave the network — and everything in Riftmap's design supports a self-hosted path for when that work is ready. Nothing phones home that can't be turned off.
- 04
One answer per question.
No configurable everything. Riftmap has opinions about how cross-repo dependency graphs should be modelled, and enforcing them keeps the graph fast, legible, and comparable across orgs.
- 05
Ship the small thing that works.
Ten ecosystems today, not two. Incremental scans, not nightly re-clones. Canvas rendering above 900 repos because force-directed layouts die there. Every one of those is a concrete answer to a concrete problem — not a feature-matrix bullet.
what's next / 04
Where this is going.
medium-term
Self-hosted GA. Same engine, Docker Compose and Helm chart, GitLab CE/EE and GitHub Enterprise support, zero code egress. For regulated and security-conscious teams — government, finance, defence — where the cloud version was never going to be an option.
long-term
Riftmap as the default way engineering orgs understand their own infrastructure. Grep, tribal knowledge, and stale service catalogs replaced by a graph that's always current because it's always derived.
If there's an ecosystem, integration, or feature that would unblock your team, tell me.
norway / 05
Built in Norway.
Designed, built, and operated from Norway. European data residency. GDPR by default. A deep bias toward data protection and sovereignty — not because of a checklist, but because of where Riftmap was built and the regulated environments it was built for.