In 2004, Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos decreed that any software built by an Amazon engineer must be shared with every other engineer at the company.

Google does something similar, and it makes good sense. The idea is to ensure that they never build the same thing twice. But for former Amazon engineer Yash Kumar, it never quite worked as well as it should have. There were just two many pieces of software to wrap your head around.

"It created a huge discovery problem," Kumar says. "There were hundreds of thousands of components and services."

As it turns out, many other outfits face much the same problem – even if they don't share code in the way Amazon does. In building software, modern companies rely on all sorts of code and tools they don't develop themselves. This includes open source software that's freely shared with the world at large, but also application programming interfaces, or APIs, that provide hooks into online services across the web. The open source search engine Ohloh spans 20,656,731,705 lines of publicly available code, and the API tracking site The Programmable Web lists over 10,000 publicly available APIs.

But Kumar offers a solution. Inspired by his time at Amazon, Kumar created a service called Runnable, a means of finding and using all the software "building blocks" that are freely available across the web.

It's early days for the service, which is still in the beta testing stage, but the aim is provide a way of not only searching for tools, but actually testing them. Sites such as Ohloh and Programmable Web let you search, but they don't let you actually experiment with software. You can also find open source code through sites like GithHub and BitBucket, but these services are more about hosting code and encouraging collaboration among developers. Runnable is a service specifically designed to get your hands on the stuff you need.

In order to test code for you, Runnable must also host it. All the code in questions sits on the service itself, and it spans several programming platforms, including PHP, JavaScript and Node.js, and Ruby on Rails.

This isn't code for full-fledged software applications. It's smaller chunks of code that do specific things. There's a snippet of code, for example, that can fetch a list of the latest videos from the TED website and embeds those videos in a webpage. Another lets you a friend list from Twitter.

Once you find a snippet you like – such as the TED video code mentioned above – you can modify it in your browser and even run it to see what happens. Kumar thinks this extra step – where the code actually executes – will be a big improvement over interactive documentation systems offered by the likes of Mashery I/O Docs and Swagger.

To execute all this code on the fly, Runnable taps virtual machines running on the Amazon cloud – another Bezos brainstorm Kumar is intimately familiar with.