beliu
Joined 13 years ago
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2,233
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239
Member since
Dec 23
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
In case folks are interested, I had a delightful interview about a year back with Max Brunsfeld, one of the original Atom devs who is now working on Zed: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld. (YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jf8AqaZ7IU)
Very excited about where this new collaborative editor goes!
Comment · 4 years ago
LOL! He did talk a lot about his programming backstory (played with BASIC as a kid, no formal training, chemistry major, discovering Linux) and how this informed his worldview. Bottom-line, he is very results-driven and I think he has a good point about how a lot of tech interviews screen too much for theory and not practice. Turns out you don't need to know how to invert a binary tree to build the most successful package manager of all time :)
Comment · 4 years ago
This is super common in my experience. Senior/experienced devs spend a bunch of time ramping up the inexperienced or new members of the team and don't have much time remaining to work on their own initiatives.
Patrick McKenzie has a good take on this along the lines of "teach someone to fish" (s/fish/code search/): https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/108611151367121715...
We've tried to make it easier to turn organic code explorations into interactive docs that can be read many times over with a notebook-like feature. Here's a notebook that bobheadxi wrote up after he noticed he was explaining Sourcegraph's authz model for the billionth time: https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks/Tm90ZWJvb2s6NTc0
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks! 100% agree with the sentiment that devs should get in front of customers. The best teams I've worked on, the devs have an "end-to-end" sense of ownership, and the organization fosters this sense of responsibility and agency. And great work should absolutely be recognized. It should be a win-win-win—better software for end users, more revenue for the company, and financial + creative satisfaction for developers. We are working with all our might to push the world in that direction.
Comment · 4 years ago
World's best code search: https://sourcegraph.com/search
Analyze code as data: https://sourcegraph.com/insights
Interactive docs you'll actually use: https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks
Take the pain out of large-scale refactors: https://sourcegraph.com/batch-changes
IDE superpowers in code reviews: https://docs.sourcegraph.com/integration/browser_extension
Comment · 4 years ago
This is really important to call out. There have been a lot of really bad practices in the past that try to reduce "developer productivity" to something that approximates a widget factory, and the results have been awful for both developers and companies. This feeds right into the last section of the post, "If we don't talk about developer productivity, someone else will"—we need more developer voices advocating for the creative spark of building software.
Comment · 4 years ago
Author of the post here. This really resonates with me. One of the best pieces of advice I've received in my life as a programmer, from my first manager actually, was "focus on getting an end-to-end system up and running first, no matter how janky, and then refine from there".
Comment · 4 years ago
Sourcegraph CTO (and author of the post) here. There's no part of our product that seeks to track software productivity?
We do have a feature (https://about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights) built around code search that lets devs define their own metrics around things like progress of big migrations and anti-patterns + code smells. This tweet is a good summary of my philosophy around code-related metrics: https://twitter.com/beyang/status/1524259425451577344.
Insights from treating code as data are best discovered by the people who know the dataset through and through—i.e., developers. Another project we've released in this vein is https://codestat.dev, built on top of Comby (incidentally also on the HN front page right now), which was created by a member of our team, Rijnard, as part of his PhD thesis on automatic program transformation.
We're developers by trade and by heart, and are motivated by making tools and mental models that devs actually find useful and that boost the creative spark of coding. If there's something we can improve about our product or message to further this mission, I'd love to hear your feedback!
Comment · 4 years ago
Sourcegraph actually does do proper semantic linking, integrating with compilers (and type inferencers for dynamic languages): https://docs.sourcegraph.com/code_intelligence/explanations/.... This is one area of significant differentiation between Sourcegraph and GitHub code navigation (which is based on GitHub's semantic library, and which ironically isn't actually semantic in the sense of understanding types as compilers do).
Admittedly, we need to do a better job of articulating this difference, but if anyone would like help getting spun up with precise code intelligence on Sourcegraph, please DM me: https://twitter.com/beyang.
Comment · 4 years ago
I’m helping with the doctree effort at Sourcegraph. Apologies, the site isn’t actually up yet. This project is still very early stages and we wrote up the README to serve as a sort of launch spec that we could update in response to feedback we receive. We made the repo public so we could build in public but didn’t expect it to receive this much attention this early!
So sorry that the site isn’t up yet. We’ll update the README soon to reflect that. If folks are interested in trying out a super early version, there’s the Docker run command and if you’d like to help us realize this vision, please join our Discord! https://discord.gg/vqsBW8m5Y8
Comment · 4 years ago
Sourcegraph CTO here. Does anyone know someone at GitHub or Microsoft we could get in touch with to take over maintenance of git.io? There are hundreds of thousands of references in open source, blog posts, and academic papers that will 404 if git.io is taken down. Sourcegraph would be happy to take over maintenance to preserve these links.
I build developer tools at Sourcegraph: https://sourcegraph.com