Everything we do stems from our purpose, to make it so everyone can code. We'll accomplish that over the next 30 years by following our strategy:
- 30 years
- 10 years
- 5 years
- 3 years
- 1 year
We want to make it so everyone can code. A world where everyone, not just ~0.1% of the world population, can code will see faster and more broadly beneficial technological progress.
For thousands of years after writing was invented, most people remained illiterate. Universal literacy seemed unlikely. Is it really possible that every human would be capable of reading and writing? How would literacy benefit the average person? As we now know, every human is capable of and benefits immensely from literacy.
More recently, around 1976, just 0.2% of the world's population used computers. Two tiny companies sought to make computing universal: Apple's vision then was to create a "bicycle for the mind" in the form of a computer, and Microsoft wanted to put a computer "on every desk and in every home". Though it seemed unlikely at the time, as we now know, everyone is capable of and benefits immensely from having a computer (or a phone).
Today, only about 0.1% of the world's population can code. That tiny group has built software that runs the modern world and improves the lives of billions of people. Think of the possibilities if everyone was able to code. All around the world, more people would be able to solve problems and improve their lives by building software. We don't know exactly what these billions of coders will create, but we know that this will bring faster and more broadly beneficial technological progress.
To make it so everyone can code, we will create tools, networks, and incentives for coding at ever-larger scale.
Our values are the principles and beliefs that help us achieve our goals and vision.
We're living in the era of Big Code: the amount, complexity, and value of code is growing quickly.
Tools and practices that were conceived before the era of Big Code will break down, leaving codebases that are huge but complex and brittle. Any change might shatter the whole thing. Developers become hesitant about making changes. Productivity slows, communication bottlenecks grow, deadlines are missed, and quality declines.
This is a new game. Companies that master this will thrive. Companies that don't will fail.
For people as users of technology, Big Code is great. It means there's more software out there, it's more personalized, it's faster, it's on their desktop and phone and watch, it's localized, and so on. But for developers, it's way harder and takes way more work to build software than it did 10 years ago.
Problem statement: In large and complex codebases (Big Code), it's hard for developers to discover, understand, and fix code.
Sourcegraph is the one place to find and fix things across all code.
- Sourcegraph knows almost everything that can be known about your code (code structure, Git metadata, build, code hosts, runtime metrics, code reviews, docs, issues, project management, etc.).
- It's easy to find and use this information on Sourcegraph itself and in your editor, code host, and code reviews.
- When you need to find something in or about your code (which happens many times per day), you usually start on Sourcegraph.
- To spread adoption of a new dev tool/practice or make a large-scale code change, you use Sourcegraph because you trust everyone uses it.
We will make universal code search accessible to everyone.
Code search is a powerful tool that becomes indispensable when you work on large, shared codebases or depend heavily on the universe of open-source code outside your organization. It's like fire––powerful and versatile and those who've seen the light can't imagine going back to the darkness. Let's bring code search down from the Mount Olympus of Tech and make it accessible to everyone, not just the 0.1% of developers who work at Google and other tech giants.
- Fast code search that scales to giant codebases and the universe of open-source code.
- Precise code navigation that makes walking the reference graph as simple as point-and-click.
- Make large scale code changes possible (universal search-and-replace).
- Integrate with code hosts and code review tools to bring these developer superpowers to everywhere SWEs need to understand code.
- Sourcegraph becomes a natural hub to distribute other dev tools, due to its extensibility and the fact that the average developer using Sourcegraph does so several times per day.
- Sourcegraph provides analytics about what parts of the code are changing and makes this view accessible to every individual developer.
We will make the universal code graph accessible to everyone.
The universe of code is exploding, but to any given person, most of that universe remains terra incognita. We will map out that universe and its graph of dependencies, references, and authorship, so that everyone can easily traverse, explore, discover, and make use of it. (Think Google vs. Yahoo.)
- Sourcegraph understands the reference and dependency graph of the open-source universe and all our customers' private code. We make it easy to walk this graph (subject to the privacy constraints of our customers and users) even if you're not a professional software engineer.
- You can see which changes to code affect you and how your changes affect others.
- When a library changes, it's commonplace to include refactoring scripts (to update call sites) along with the change. Sourcegraph automatically propagates the suggested changes to all public and private code that depends on the library.
- You can discover and more easily use libraries, with data about who uses them and how they're used.
- Sourcegraph understands how the entire codebase of an organization is evolving and makes this accessible to codebase owners. The health and overall status of the codebase is no longer opaque to engineering leaders.
We will make it so coding is a universal skill (just like universal literacy). This requires not only making coding easier but also introducing more widely available economic incentives--letting anyone earn a living coding from anywhere in the world.
As code becomes an essential part of every company and organization, more and more people can make an impact by having access to code. It will start with roles like product management and SRE that are adjacent to software engineering, but we envision a future where code becomes so critical that nearly everyone in an organization will have an interest in understanding it and modifying it. This applies to organizations of all sizes--and even individuals earning a living from libraries they wrote and shared with others who make profitable end-user products on top of them.
Coding itself is a technology, and we anticipate the technology adoption curve will eventually extend to nearly everyone. (Just like everyone has adopted the "technology" of reading and writing--literacy.) Tools like Netscape Navigator and Google Web Search made the internet accessible to all, and Windows and Macintosh made desktop computing accessible to all. We will make coding accessible to all.
- Sourcegraph code search supports high-level queries (e.g.,
function to parse URL,function to marshal struct into ${INTERNAL_FORMAT}). - Non-technical people can use Sourcegraph to gain an understanding of what a piece of code does and modify it. E.g., a salesperson can look up a function that encodes a piece of automation in the sales process and change it to align with updated sales priorities for the quarter.
- Sourcegraph provides a discovery and marketplace mechanism for authors of useful shared libraries to distribute and make a living off of novel source code and algorithms.
- Sourcegraph is universal code search, not universal "everything" search. Any additional data types in our search need to be relevant to the software development workflow.
- We want every developer, not just a specific niche audience, to use Sourcegraph.
- We won't adopt polarizing public stances that would divide our audience.
- Our product should strive to be fundamentally privacy-respecting and secure. This means that users don't need to trust us to verify that their data is private and secure.
- Build on-ramps in our product to turn more people into frequent users, instead of building the product for infrequent users (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy).
- We eventually want to be a platform that ties together all of the tools developers use.
- Other developer tools are partners, not competitors.
- This entails designing for extensibility in our product (and documenting it more thoroughly) as a first-order priority.
- Sourcegraph provides greater value the larger a software team. We are building not just for individual developers, but for development teams. We believe software development is increasingly a multiplayer game.
- Sufficiently good code search will be useful to every developer many times per day (on average). It may take a while to convert any specific person into a frequent code search power user, but it will happen eventually.
- Code search that is exclusively for public/open-source code is not actually that useful because most people spend most of their time working on their organization's internal code.
- Any given developer will only pick one code search tool to use. Any given company will standardize on a single code search tool.
- Therefore, to avoid fragmentation, Sourcegraph should be not only much better than the alternatives, but also not worse in any significant way.
- Trying Sourcegraph (to prove it works and is valuable) is free and (if you want) self-service.
- If your organization is getting value from Sourcegraph with a lot of users, our pricing is designed so that we earn money from you. This lets us invest in improving our product.
- All users at a given customer are on the same pricing tier. This is simpler than having users at different tiers and encourages us to build things that are broadly valuable.
Our product direction describes what we plan to build to make this vision real.
Our goals describe what each of us is working toward now (so that we succeed in our long-term mission).