“Developer productivity is not lines of code written. It’s not the number of commits. It has to do with the ultimate problem you’re solving and the users that you’re solving it for."

Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a developer tools company that brings universal code search capability for developers. In this episode, Beyang shared with me his perspective about developers’ productivity and how we should go about measuring developers’ productivity, including the danger of measuring productivity by using proxy metrics. We then discussed the rationale for universal code search and why he thinks there is a massive need for it to increase developers’ productivity, borrowing from his experience working at Google, and especially to cope in the current era of “Big Code”. Towards the end, Beyang shared how individuals can improve their personal developer productivity and what the future state of developer tools would look like. Also, listen to some of the Sourcegraph cool use cases that Beyang shared based on the feedback given by his customers.

Listen out for:

• Career Journey - [00:04:53]
• Developers Productivity - [00:07:47]
• Measuring Developers Productivity - [00:12:15]
• The Danger of Proxy Metrics - [00:16:51]
• Productivity in Enterprise vs Startup - [00:23:40]
• Rationale for Code Search - [00:26:54]
• Code Search Case Studies - [00:33:16]
• Other Useful Developer Tools - [00:38:32]
• Ex-Googler’s Guide to Developer Tools - [00:42:20]
• Improving Personal Developer Productivity - [00:46:07]
• Future State of Developer Tools - [00:49:32]
• 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:28]

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Beyang Liu’s Bio
Beyang is the CTO and cofounder of Sourcegraph, a developer tools company bringing universal code search to every developer in open source and every software organization, including leading companies like Uber, Dropbox, Yelp, PayPal, Cloudflare, and more.

Follow Beyang:

• Twitter – https://twitter.com/beyang
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/beyang-liu/
• Website – https://beyang.org
• Sourcegraph – https://sourcegraph.com/

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/34.