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When folks ask me a question about our codebase internally I try to
a) answer the question
b) say "If I were trying to find the answer to that question with our tools, here's my entry point, here's the search query, and here's my mental heuristic for why I'd click on result #3"
a) answer the question
b) say "If I were trying to find the answer to that question with our tools, here's my entry point, here's the search query, and here's my mental heuristic for why I'd click on result #3"
This is trying to thread the needle on always, always being happy to give responsive answers to questions while also increasing people's ability to self-serve on them in the future.
Since it's publicly available, let me mention that the most common tool I use for answering these questions is livegrep and that I intend to boot up a livegrep instance on the first day of every startup for the rest of my life.
It borders on miraculous.
github.com/livegrep/liveg…
It borders on miraculous.
github.com/livegrep/liveg…
"What's livegrep do?" Instantly grep all code at your company from a web interface, with it producing the relevant files, contextual snippets, and links to the full version in Github/GHE/etc.
It's blaaaaaazing fast, too, even across our Very Materially Sized codebase.
It's blaaaaaazing fast, too, even across our Very Materially Sized codebase.
Importantly, because livegrep functions through a web interface, you don't need to have the right repository checked out to very quickly answer questions about it.
(It's also ~100X faster than trying to search Github, in my experience, and significantly faster than grep.)
(It's also ~100X faster than trying to search Github, in my experience, and significantly faster than grep.)
