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The Craft of Open Source

Quinn Slack, CEO & Co-Founder Of Sourcegraph

Universal code search is an awesome tool that can make you a lot more efficient as a coder, but not many developers or companies use it. An open source alternative to Google Code Search, Sourcegraph is on a mission to bring this underappreciated piece of software into every developer and every company that needs it. The company’s CEO, Quinn Slack joins Ben Rometsch on the show to share how Sourcegraph works with former Google developers to replicate some of the amazing features of Google’s internal code search tool that are not offered by most of the competition. He also talks about the initial struggle they had in offering a cloud service, their subsequent shift to self-hosting, and the difficult decision to go partially open source. A coder himself, Quinn believes that once developers start using code search, they wouldn’t be able to live without it again. But first, the challenge is to convince them to use it in the first place.

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