(2022-10-04) Yegge Joins As Head Of Engineering: or, Why I Left Retirement To Join Sourcegraph

Steve Yegge joins as Head of Engineering (or, “Why I left retirement to join Sourcegraph”). Hey folks! TL;DR: I have joined Sourcegraph as Head of Engineering, where we are building the world’s most open and comprehensive code intelligence platform (CIP).

Episode I: The Phantom Code Base

Compiler folks create code intelligence, which in turn powers developer tooling of all shapes and sizes.

In the mid-2000s, the party started shifting over to Google. Which is where I was working

When the Microsoft devs would show up at Google, they’d throw an impressively theatrical tantrum over the lack of tooling

By 2008, I’d had enough of their accurate and frankly hurtful complaints. I decided to build a powerful code intelligence platform called Grok. The idea was to harvest code intelligence from production compilers, aggregate it into a queryable knowledge graph, and serve the intelligence via APIs to other tools. It was a way to help all tools make it easier for you to navigate code.

One particularly powerful tool enhanced by Grok is Google Code Search.

finding the code where you want to start your exploration. Whereas Grok guides you after you click a search result.

Google engineers today can navigate and understand their own multi-billion-line code base better than perhaps any other group of devs in such a large environment. So you’d think someone would have done it for the rest of us by now.

Episode II: A Lack of Clones

There’s been a lot of innovation in the code intelligence space since then. Microsoft has continued to innovate, JetBrains is amazing, and so on. But nobody has succeeded in making something like Grok

Doing Grok outside Google? Supporting heterogeneous environments and enterprise-scale code deployments? That is orders of magnitude harder.

One thing is clear: The only time we ever get to witness a renaissance in code-intelligence is when all the compiler folks come together from around the world to party somewhere that lets them be free.

Episode III: Revenge of LSIF

But then a surprise came: They asked me to write some code. This was the first leadership interview loop in the past 12 months (20+ companies) in which anyone had asked me to write code

while I was doing my homework, I discovered two really cool things

First, I found that Sourcegraph is actually the best-in-class tool for navigating and understanding source code spanning multiple repositories. I was in a rush to get the interview coding homework done, which meant I needed to understand Sourcegraph’s codebase as quickly as possible

But I found something else, too.

Episode IV: A New Hope

Sourcegraph, you see, has built Grok.

This little band of compiler folk created SCIP - the source code intelligence protocol

Episode V: Stevey Strikes Back

Episode VI: Return of the party

Existing developer tools will finally be able to leave the “glass marble” heuristic-intelligence economy behind, and gravitate towards SCIP as the open, universal “diamond” standard for code intelligence.