Storytime with Steve Yegge (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week it’s storytime with Steve Yegge! Steve came out of retirement to join Sourcegraph as Head of Engineering. Their next frontier is Cody, their AI coding assistant that answers code questions and writes code for you by reading your entire codebase and the code graph. But, we really spent a lot of time talking with Steve about his time at Amazon, Google, and Grab. Ok, it’s storytime!

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Sponsors:

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Featuring:

• Steve Yegge – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant
• steve-yegge-platform-rant-follow-up.md
• Steve Yegge joins as Head of Engineering (or, “Why I left retirement to join Sourcegraph”)
• All You Need Is Cody
• Cody is Cheating
• A good day with Jeff
• Steve Yegge on Wikipedia
• Why I left Google to join Grab
• Cody AI
• Yin and Yang on Wikipedia

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Sentry (00:00:59)

https://sentry.io/for/performance/

3. Start the show! (00:04:44)

4. Did Jeff have the vision of AWS? (00:07:49)

5. SOAP was cool? (00:10:14)

6. Scope: A story I've never told (00:16:30)

7. Yin and Yang (00:22:58)

8. Jeff freezes people (00:24:14)

9. Sponsor: Drata (00:28:23)

https://drata.com/partner/changelog

10. Thinking on your feet (00:30:06)

11. Be like water? (no) (00:31:05)

12. Steve is 'the closer' (00:31:42)

13. Book causes eviction!! (00:35:38)

14. Sociopathic leaders (00:42:54)

15. Since you've been gone (from Google) (00:47:18)

16. Where is Google going? (00:52:16)

17. Will Apple call it AI? (00:58:57)

18. Did you Google that? (01:00:10)

19. Here's how Google wins (01:02:57)

20. Bake in 'opt-in relevance' (01:05:48)

21. From retirement to Sourcegraph (01:06:38)

22. Humans need struggle (01:09:27)

23. Why Sourcegraph? (01:11:19)

24. Where is Cody going? (01:15:00)

25. Steve made Jeff Bezos giggle (01:23:45)

26. Grab was fun (01:25:44)

27. Cody is cheating (01:27:54)

28. How to be inevitable (01:32:34)

29. A second prescription (01:35:36)

30. Up next! (01:41:00)