The Sourcegraph Podcast

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

Matt Holt is the author of many popular projects in the Go open-source world, among them the popular Caddy web server, which pioneered support for HTTP/2 and might still be the only major web server to support automatic TLS by default.

Matt talks about his motivations for creating Caddy, how the project grew and evolved over time, what it was like to do a complete rewrite from Caddy v1 to v2, and the challenges of maintaining a very popular open-source project. He also talks about his latest project, a TCP multiplexer called Project Conncept.

Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/matt-holt/

Thorsten Klein is the creator of k3d, a tool that lets you run a lightweight Kubernetes cluster (k3s) inside a single Docker container. This makes it much easier to spin up a Kubernetes cluster in places like your dev environment, your CI pipeline, or a low-resource environment like a Raspberry Pi.

Thorsten is a DevOps engineer at Trivago, where he works on developer experience for a team that maintains a set of bare-metal Kubernetes clusters. We chat about the ways in which developers are using k3d, Thorsten's motivations and inspirations for writing it, and other tools he finds useful in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Rijnard van Tonder is the creator of Comby, a pattern-matching syntax and command-line tool that offers a more expressive and more user-friendly alternative to regular expressions for many common patterns in code.

Rijnard was previously a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, and we chat about the state of the art in static analysis and automated bug-fixing, new tools made in industry like Pyre and Sapienz, and what place machine learning has in the world of developer tools.

Show notes: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/rijnard-van-tonder/notes
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Yves Junqeira and John Ewart are co-founders of YourBase, a build and test runner service that accelerates testing and CI by understanding the implicit dependency graph of your builds. YourBase integrates with most major build tools and employs system call analysis and static language analysis to infer the build dependency structure without the need for manual configuration. It then uses this information to parallelize and cache builds, yielding significant performance improvements.

Yves and John reflect on their experiences working as SRE inside Google and SWE inside Amazon and how writing code is different inside these organizations, both compared to one another and to the rest of the world. They share lessons learned and advice for potential developer tool founders.

Show notes: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/yves-and-john/notes

Transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/yves-and-john/transcript

If you write code on the modern web, it's almost certain that your life has been shaped significantly by Luke Hoban's work. Luke has worked on developer tools his entire career. He started out on Visual Studio, C#, and .NET in the early 2000s, later joined the ECMAScript standards body as a representative of Microsoft, and then became one of the co-founders of the TypeScript programming language. Today, he is the CTO of Pulumi, an infrastructure-as-code company that lets you write your deployment config as code in your favorite language.

Luke shares stories from the early days of TypeScript and talks about how it evolved from a two-man team to one of the most successful programming languages and open-source projects. We discuss important inflection points and design decisions that played a key role in TypeScript's runaway success. We also dive into the symbiotic relationship that TypeScript had with another early project just getting off the ground at the time: VS Code. Luke also shares his learnings from his stint at AWS, how his role at Pulumi combines his two passions for programming languages and cloud infrastructure, and how Pulumi brings the niceties of the IDE experience to an area that sorely needs it—infrastructure configuration management.

Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/luke-hoban/

Evan Culver builds developer tools at Segment, a customer data platform that lets product managers and software teams understand their users through data.

Evan's career has spanned many years up and down the software stack, from frontend UI development to infrastructure and ops. For the past five years, his focus has been developer tooling and infrastructure, having worked on these during his tenure at Uber during its hypergrowth years and now on the dev tools team at Segment, where his charter is to "empower the engineers of Segment with the tools to automate, optimize, and streamline their workflows." In this episode, he explains to Beyang what exactly that means, discussing Segment's use of technologies from the AWS ecosystem, the popular open-source secret management tool they created, ChatOps, and various Docker- and Kubernetes-based tools that are useful for managing the deployment of many microservices.

Show notes and transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/evan-culver