Disassembling and building developer tools, with Nelson Elhage, creator of open source code search engine Livegrep

Why is a systems engineering mindset essential for a scaling startup? In this episode of the Sourcegraph Podcast, Nelson Elhage, creator of the open source code search engine Livegrep, co-creator of the Ruby type checker Sorbet, and Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to discuss how Rust is changing the security landscape, explain why Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11, called his live code search tool “miraculous,” and dive deep into the weeds on the differences between trigram- and suffix-array-based search systems. Along the way, Elhage explains why developer productivity is nonlinear and why investing in developer experience should be axiomatic.

Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/nelson-elhage/

Sourcegraph: about.sourcegraph.com