The Sourcegraph Podcast

How do you design software docs and websites that both intrigue and educate? As a contributor to popular projects like React Native, Jest, Prettier, and TypeScript, Orta Therox has prioritized design for visual engagement, accessibility, and learning. In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Orta talks about the importance of engaging docs, how experimentation fuels learning and engineering in TypeScript, and how developers can write better code examples with Shiki Twoslash, a project he developed and designed. Along the way, Orta also shares his own story of getting into code and the odd way he was hired on Microsoft's TypeScript compiler team.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/orta-therox/Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com

Christopher Chedeau discusses the creation of Excalidraw, a popular virtual whiteboard app, and his journey from modding video games to joining Facebook. He also shares insights on the early days of React, time management in project management, and the lasting impact of React in the front end community.

What’s it like to deconstruct one of the largest Rails codebases (3 million lines of code, 500,000+ lifetime commits, 40,000 files) on the planet? And why didn’t Shopify follow the standard path to microservices, but instead chose to modularize their monolith? In this episode, Kirsten Westeinde, software development manager at Shopify, describes how her team led the charge in refactoring and re-architecting Shopify's massive codebase, sharing the winding path they took to make this massive change and the way they tackled both the technical and human side of this challenge.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/refactoring-shopify-codebase-kirsten-westeinde/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

Devon Zuegel, the creator of GitHub Sponsors, tells the story of how an email rant to Nat Friedman on the eve of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub turned into the most popular way to fund open source. She also shares her thoughts on different models of paying for software and where the future of the code economy is headed.Show notes & transcript: about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/devon-zuegel/Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

As an engineer at Puppet, CoreOS, and Google Cloud, Kelsey Hightower has been at the forefront of new deployment technologies over the past decade. Along the way, he has built tools like confd, created learning resources like Kubernetes The Hard Way, co-founded KubeCon, and taught multitudes of people about containers, infrastructure as code, service meshes, and the operating system of the cloud.In this conversation, Kelsey talks about how he learns new technologies, shares stories over the course of Kubernetes history, and explains how one might make sense of the varied ecosystem of infrastructure tools ("engineering organizations are like restaurants").Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/kelsey-hightower

Peter Pezaris is the CEO and founder of Codestream, an editor plugin that's bringing code discussions and communication into your IDE. Codestream is starting by bringing GitHub PRs into your editor, but it has a novel vision for knowledge sharing that goes well beyond that. We talk about that vision, the shortcomings of existing communication tools for developers, and the challenges of building a uniform user experience on top of multiple editor APIs.Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/peter-pezaris

Jonathan Carter (a.k.a. LostInTangent) is the principal program manager at Microsoft for VS Code Liveshare, GitHub Codespaces, and IntelliCode. We talk about how Liveshare is opening up new possibilities in pair programming, how Codespaces aims to reduce a key source of developer friction, and how he and his team want to enable more developers to say "yes" to the question, "Why not now?" Jonathan also talks about building dev tools in his spare time, including his latest project, Code Tour, a VS Code extension that lets you create guided tours through your codebase.Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/jonathan-carter/

Andrew Gallant (a.k.a. BurntSushi) is the creator of ripgrep, a popular command-line search tool that powers the search box in VS Code. Andrew tells me how ripgrep began, explains why it's faster than GNU grep and other grep alternatives, and gets into the nitty-gritty of regex optimization.We also discuss another matter near and dear to both of us: Linux window management. Andrew talks about what he likes about Go and Haskell and why Rust is his current go-to programming language, and finally he shares a humorous anecdote involving algorithms, technical recruiting, and everyone's favorite New England sports team.

Syrus Akbary is the founder and CEO of Wasmer, the startup behind the open-source web assembly runtime that's doing for WebAssembly what Docker did for LXC. Syrus explains what WebAssembly is, why it matters outside your browser, and how it compares to other virtualization technologies. He shares the pains that motivated him to look into WebAssembly and eventually led him to create a new WebAssembly runtime and a new company around it. We dive deep into WebAssembly as a technology, its portability and performance characteristics, and talk about the importance of prioritizing community and developer experience when building new development platforms.Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/syrus-akbary

Michael Stapelberg shares with us a multitude of experiences and contributions across the Go and Linux open-source communities. Highlights include creating the popular window manager i3, building Debian Code Search, and researching fast package management for Linux with distri. Thorsten Ball, author of Writing a Compiler in Go and Writing an Interpreter in Go, joins. The three of us talk about the importance of developer experience to open-source communities, how code search changes how you work, and how to decide when to build something new.Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/michael-stapelberg