The Sourcegraph Podcast

Why should programmers treat programming like a craft? In this episode, Max Brunsfeld, co-founder of Zed, a collaborative code editor written in Rust, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to share the apprenticeship-like pair-programming experience that taught him to appreciate programming, explain how he learned the fundamentals of parsing on the weekends and tell the story of presenting an application he couldn’t explain to Paul Graham at Y Combinator. Along the way, Max describes how the Zed team passes off in-progress branches to teammates in other countries and keeps development moving across time zones.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld/Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com

Why is using PlanetScale a mind-altering experience? In this episode, Sugu Sougoumarane, co-founder and CTO of PlanetScale, shares how one email got him a second job interview with Elon Musk, tells the story of how he became one of the elite engineers at Paypal by solving the company’s most painful process, and explains why database administrators are shifting from managing machines to managing fleets of machines. Along the way, Sougoumarane explains why so many developers have told him they’ve felt like they’ve waited their whole lives for self-serve schema deployment.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/sugu-sougoumarane/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

Why is a systems engineering mindset essential for a scaling startup? In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Nelson Elhage, creator of the open source code search engine Livegrep, co-creator of the Ruby type checker Sorbet, and Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to discuss how Rust is changing the security landscape, explain why Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11, called his live code search tool “miraculous,” and dive deep into the weeds on the differences between trigram- and suffix-array-based search systems. Along the way, Elhage explains why developer productivity is nonlinear and why investing in developer experience should be axiomatic.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/nelson-elhage/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

Why is building a technical community the most effective moat out there for startups? In this episode, swyx, who runs DevRel at Temporal and co-founded the Svelte Society, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to discuss the stress-induced heart palpitations that led him to transition from finance to tech, show how you can harness a willingness to look stupid to become a standout member of your community, and explain why every book should come with a Discord. Along the way, swyx shares some of the ways learning in public has changed his life, including how one blog post earned two job offers.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/swyx/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

When, and how, will computer vision and machine learning revolutionize the world? In this episode of the Sourceraph Podcast, Joseph Nelson, CEO and co-founder of Roboflow, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to discuss how Joseph got started in programming (developing a joke generator for a graphing calculator), to share his experience working as a human Google alert for the United States Congress, and to explain why he finds building developer tools so empowering. Along the way, Joseph explains why he thinks machine learning and computer vision will have greater effects than the Internet and the mobile phone and shows how Roboflow will accelerate our progress toward that future. And at the end, Joseph tours Beyang through Roboflow, showing him a raccoon detector and chess piece identifier. Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/joseph-nelson/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

How can you build a following, and a career, with memes? In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Cassidy Williams, Director of Developer Experience at Netlify, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to discuss why we should consider communication a core skill instead of a soft skill, why you should be a developer advocate or a software engineer but not both, and why, when learning React, you should start with the fundamentals. Along the way, Cassidy shares stories about the job she held the longest (mascot for Iowa State), positive and negative experiences from the heyday of hackathons, and the time she nearly went blind from burnout.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/cassidy-williams/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

How do Google developers create and popularize internal tools? In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Han-Wen Nienhuys, creator of the open-source code search engine Zoekt, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to discuss the agonizing experience with Perforce that drove Han-Wen to build his first dev tool, explain the value of coding on trains and planes, and share the story of how building code search nearly inspired a street named after him in Sweden. Along the way, Han-Wen offers an inside look at the history behind some of Google’s most famous dev tools, such as Blaze, Code Search, and Piper.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/han-wen-nienhuys/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

How do you improve on C? In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Andrew Kelley, creator of the Zig programming language and the founder and president of the Zig Software Foundation, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph and special guest Stephen Gutekanst, software engineer at Sourcegraph, to talk about what it takes to create a new programming language. Along the way, Andrew shares how programmers can get funding for their side projects and hobbies, why conditional compilation exposes philosophical differences between Zig and C, and explains why and how Zig can be faster than both C and Rust.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/andrew-kelley/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

How do you make security, a topic that often requires a PhD to understand, accessible to your average developer? In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Sam Scott, co-founder and CTO of Oso, a batteries-included library for building authorization into your application, comes on the podcast to explain to Beyang Liu, CTO at Sourcegraph, his vision for the future of security development. Along the way, Sam also shares how he got started in cryptography, explains why they pivoted Oso from infrastructure to application authorization, and shows Beyang how you can use Oso to build an authorization model with just 26 lines of code.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/sam-scott/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

What’s the future of feature flags? On this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Brothers Ivar Østhus and Egil Østhus, co-founders of Unleash, join Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO Beyang Liu to discuss their open source project and open core company. In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Ivar and Egil talk about their histories in programming and open source, share the inspiration for turning a side project into a full-time job, and dissect the current state, as well as the future of, the feature flag market. Along the way, Ivar and Egil share an intimate look at their growing company, their evolving technology suite, and their plans for world domination. Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/ivar-egil-osthus/Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com