from Hacker News

Steve Yegge Joins as Head of Engineering of Sourcegraph

by misternugget on 10/4/22, 4:21 PM with 77 comments

• by belfalas on 10/4/22, 5:17 PM

  The length of the article is how you know it's the real Steve Yegge. :)

  Youngbloods: if you have not spent time with Steve Yegge's old writings, please go check them out. Much good received wisdom there.

• by beyang on 10/4/22, 5:16 PM

  Sourcegraph CTO here. We're elated to welcome Steve to the team and will be hosting a Twitter live / AMA (https://twitter.com/sourcegraph/status/1577364344056201236) with him tomorrow at 1pm PT. Join us if you're free!

• by scarlet_lovah on 10/5/22, 2:55 PM

  I see the Steve Yegge cycle begins anew.

  1 Join a company

  2 write a lengthy, self-important diatribe/novella about why he joined

  3 Write several lengthy, self-important diatribes, often namedropping previous places he worked and/or how he accidentally influenced some C level officer just by dint of his unique persona =) That rascally Steve!

  4 Repeat step 3 anywhere between 10-50 times

  5 Quit job, write lengthy self-important diatribe about why he left (optionally leaping straight into step 1 again, sometimes with a break inbetween)

  Should be an interesting 6 months for Sourcegraph, at least! Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

• by yodon on 10/4/22, 5:29 PM

  I can't help but read Steve Yegge's announcement in the context of Novig's Law ("compiler research leads to a doubling of compute power every 18 years")[0].

  If his presence and enthusiasm can get the compiler community aiming its collective brain power at real developer productivity problems (the why behind SourceGraph's exponential growth) rather than focused on compiler optimization problems, this is going to be a really great time to be writing software!

  [0] https://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html

• by bastardoperator on 10/4/22, 5:34 PM

  How does sourcegraph compare to the new/beta https://cs.github.com?

• by prepend on 10/5/22, 3:21 AM

  I really like the idea of sourcegraph but the price seems bonkers. $100/month/user is more than I spend on ides, more than GitHub, the same as GitLab ultimate (that I don’t use because it’s so expensive), more than o365, more than windows, etc etc etc.

  I want to have source intelligence but I can’t see the biggest chunk of my dev stack to be sourcegraph.

• by jeffbee on 10/4/22, 5:15 PM

  Article raises 2 questions for me.

  1) How can you write this whole article without saying "Kythe"?

  2) How exactly can github search be as bad as it is? With all of Microsoft behind it, you'd think it would be a lot better than it is.

• by dadkins on 10/4/22, 10:52 PM

  "This was the first leadership interview loop in the past 12 months (20+ companies) in which anyone had asked me to write code."

  Interesting data point for the question: at what point in your career will you stop being asked to write code on a whiteboard to prove you aren't lying on your resume.

• by thot_experiment on 10/5/22, 2:26 AM

  I'm really curious to see how this plays out. My ex-roomate has a very bad experience working at sourcegraph and the way he was pushed out of the company left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm curious to see if Steve's brand is strong enough that he'll have the power to be able to improve the engineering culture, my fear is that this is a hire primarily for external optics reasons.

  Anyway, just sharing an anecdote and hope this works out well for all involved.

• by ta1993gh on 10/4/22, 5:40 PM

  Weren’t they just laying off a bunch of people? Now on a hiring spree?

• by dunk010 on 10/4/22, 7:02 PM

  I've watched that Grok video a dozen times and drooled at the possibilities if it were available to the world at large. And now it is!! It'll also be nice that people will remember that Grok came long before LSP :P

• by wyldfire on 10/4/22, 5:20 PM

  > But you don’t have to join Sourcegraph to be able to party with us. Our code and our development are public

  Oh cool - AFAICT, that "our code" link is a link to a demo instance of sourcegraph on sourcegraph's code. This looks like an interesting product.

  And it's open source? What's present in the commercial offering that's missing from the open source one? Just support, or features too?

• by dilyevsky on 10/4/22, 6:29 PM

  When I investigated sg for former gig I found out that bazel was still not supported. How does uber uses it for their monorepo in that case?

• by fsloth on 10/4/22, 7:14 PM

  What a nice read again - haven't had these in a while. I wonder what Mr. Yegge's position on the best language is nowadays.

• by softwarebeware on 10/4/22, 9:05 PM

  Someone help me understand what I'm missing. It sounds like in this article Steve Yegge is describing a tool like Atlassian Fisheye or grepcode and talking about it like it doesn't exist. These tools are out there. I don't see what's missing.

• by hankchinaski on 10/4/22, 5:47 PM

  Who is Steve yegge?

• by swah on 10/4/22, 5:42 PM

  I haven't finished the article yet but someone please clarify to me: I thought "Language Server Protocol" had solved this?