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

On the eve of the pandemic, Christopher Chedeau was procrastinating performance reviews at Facebook and decided to hack together a simple drawing app. That weekend project became Excalidraw, an open-source virtual whiteboard so popular that its users have basically demanded a startup form around it so that they can bring it to work. In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Christopher tells the backstory of Excalidraw's meteoric rise, as well as his story of joining Facebook and coming to America, and tales from the early days of React and how React Native was born.

Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/christopher-chedeau/

Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com

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

In this episode, we cover part two of our series on developer onboarding with Limor Bergman. Limor's career spans many storied companies: she's been an engineering manager at Sun Microsystems and VMware, director of engineering of DigitalOcean's cloud computing division,  and is now the director of mentorship at PowerToFly where she helps women in technology uplevel and make big career moves. She shares with us her approach to ensuring knowledge transfer, how to onboard people into legacy code, and talks about what has changed over the past 20 years for software engineers. 

For the final segment of our three-part series on developer onboarding, we chat with our very own Jean du Plessis, director of engineering at Sourcegraph. 

Jean talks about the role checklists can play in onboarding, why context is king for coders, how to facilitate context transfer, and how software engineering can seem like one part adventure, one part archeology. We also touch on the topic of continuous onboarding, and how it relates to general developer productivity. 

We're kicking off a new season of the Sourcegraph podcast with a three-part series discussing how engineering leaders onboard new teammates. 

First up is a guest from season one, Ryan Djurovich, DevOps Manager at Xero, one of the largest accounting software companies in the world. He talks about how to strike the right balance between autonomy and consistency, the importance of tools in the process, and how to foster a high-trust environment. 

Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/onboarding-ryan-djurovich

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/