June 1, 2020
Beyang Liu
Welcome to the Sourcegraph Podcast, a new show about developer tools and their creators. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be publishing conversations with people we think are some of the best and brightest minds working on tools and infrastructure for developers. Here’s a partial lineup:
If you have ideas or suggestions for guests, hit us up on Twitter. We’re speaking to an audience of developers who love leveling up their productivity and, perhaps, who also aspire to create great dev tools themselves. If that’s you, then subscribe! We look forward to sharing some insightful conversations with you over the next few weeks.
Hello, Internet. My name is Beyang and I love developer tools. One of the things that made me fall in love with programming was that feeling you get when you hit enter and see the source code come alive for the first time in the shape of the program that you just imagined, designed, and brought forth into existence. That was a feeling that I wanted to experience every single day.
Problem was, when I started coding professionally, I found there was all this stuff in the way of getting to that feeling. Whether it’s trying to understand how to use a particular API, digging through the complexity of existing code, untangling your dependencies, unbreaking your build, waiting for code review, waiting for CI, or being woken up in the middle of the night by a production outage, we spend too much of our time as developers wading through the mud, and not enough time doing what we love.
That’s why I love developer tools. They help you cut through the stressful, tedious, or straight-up boring parts of the job, so you can focus on creating and quickly getting to that point of bringing your code to life.
That’s also why we’re starting the Sourcegraph Podcast, a show featuring cool developer tools we’ve come across and the people who created them.
Since Quinn and I started Sourcegraph back in 2013, the world of developer tools and infrastructure has exploded. There’s never been a better time to be a software engineer. The ecosystem of tools and applications that aim to help you work more efficiently is booming. Yet the explosion of different offerings can also be a bit bewildering.
It can sometimes feel like a full-time job just staying on top of the latest libraries, frameworks, plugins, extensions, CLI tools, and developer apps. We want to help you do that, by giving you a window into the minds of some of the best and brightest people working at the forefront of developer productivity. You’ll hear from dev tool company founders, open-source authors, and developer efficiency leaders inside some of the best engineering organizations.
Our guests include one of the founders of the modern Observability movement, a co-founder of TypeScript, a developer infrastructure leader during the hypergrowth years at Uber, a PhD researcher who developed an alternative to regex, and several engineers who started companies inspired by both the pain-points and the quality of developer experience inside companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Dropbox.
They’re sharing war stories, origin stories, worldviews, histories, prognostications, and the tools and technologies they’re most excited about today.
If you’re a programmer who is passionate about leveling up your own productivity or perhaps an aspiring dev tool creator yourself, check out this podcast. Seriously. Click subscribe now! And if you have ideas or suggestions about other great tools or people we can feature on this show, hit us up on Twitter. We are looking forward to sharing some great conversations with you in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned.