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1. Why does Google develop their own tools? 2. Why doesn't Google open source them?
Often there's no OSS version yet.
Usually they have better performance.
They want cluster and multi-cluster services.
> 2. Why doesn't Google open source them?
Mainly dependencies.
But they release academic papers that OSS implements.
Isn't code search more table stakes nowadays? Both github and gitlab have it. There isn't anything said about end to end, integration or functional testing here. I'm in a world where everyone hacks their own system together onto the same runtime, leading to some wonky outcomes and lots of operational support. Would be interesting if there was a 'google' way to do it.
Last I checked, GitHub's code search was so bad that it's useless. There's definitely a use for good code search.
I was recently able to use it to find all repos in my org using git-lfs by searching for .gitattributes with certain properties.
And I was able to search all projects for a particular secret string.
(Googler here) The article is a good description of the tools, and I was not aware of the blaze clones plz and pants. One thing that is maybe not obvious: For an API author, code search in combination with a monorepo and the somewhat hermetic universe which is Google's code base provides immediate access to all uses of a library. You can see what worked well and what didn't, and it enables effective refactorings. Tha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Declaring a FAANG company failing because it‘s toolset is antiquated is the rare hn elitist opinion you see here more and more. Are startup people in the valley more and more becoming blind to the real world?
I'd say once you take a peak behind the curtain at some of these FAANGS you see that their once greatest assets are becoming liabilities. The magic of "FAANG" goes away. The innovative systems they all built in 2007-2012 period are now aging.
To my eyes, we still develop software in plain text and the same languages are still dominant. It's still Linux and http.
Nice, but tools are only one thing to miss about development at Google (or any other of the FAANGs). I found the more meaningful thing is the ecosystem of smart engineers, and the ability to find others who face similar problems, exchange ideas and solutions. It's a skill of its own to find these people and learn their "language", but once you do, it's a huge multiplier that is hard to find elsewhere.
1. Why does Google develop their own tools? 2. Why doesn't Google open source them?
Because it benefits Google.
> 2. Why doesn't Google open source them?
Because that would benefit the competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, but what's notable about Google is the extent to which everything is a text config file, and the fact that everything is in a monorepo. As an example that surprised me, even our oncall rotations are kept in a text file along with a list of upcoming assignments. The rotation tool checks out that file and appends the next few names in the list to the end of that file to prepare the "calendar" for the coming we…
Unsurprisingly, this reminds me of upstream Kubernetes where code reviewers/approvers and project maintainers are all just text files named OWNERS, and the tools just read the files to enforce the rules. Very simple and elegant!
Sourcegraph seems interesting but the pricing seems off for me. The “Teams” plan costs $150/month for 25 people and that works out to $6/user/month. Using GitHub it’s between $4-21/user/month. So this means that insight from my source costs sometimes more than actually managing my source. I’ve never worked at Google but it seems like one benefit is that they’ve figured out how to scale the costs of this kind of funct…
It only needs to save your developers a few minutes of time on average to be worth it.
Let’s say sourcegraph saves a few minutes and it worth it. GitHub saves way more time so it’s relative value is much higher.
I think this is a problem with many SaaS products in that it’s more “efficient” to just be software. It also seems like the per user costs are relatively low and the effort is in the code base indexing and whatnot.
I think it’s a good idea and think it’s great if users are happy. But I’d rather have an OSS product that I could install as part of the tons of other stuff I use than be on the hook for a monthly charge for every user.
I expect that they’ll be bought by GitHub or GitLab and rolled in at some point and will make more sense to me value wise when it’s like $.17 or something of an overall source management cost.
Isn't code search more table stakes nowadays? Both github and gitlab have it. There isn't anything said about end to end, integration or functional testing here. I'm in a world where everyone hacks their own system together onto the same runtime, leading to some wonky outcomes and lots of operational support. Would be interesting if there was a 'google' way to do it.
Last I checked, GitHub's code search was so bad that it's useless. There's definitely a use for good code search.
Article author interned there for "less than a year" -- LinkedIn.
Plenty of time to get an idea of the engineering workflow.