Storytime with Steve Yegge

The Changelog

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!

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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Featuring:

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(00:59) - Sponsor: Sentry
(04:44) - Start the show!
(07:49) - Did Jeff have the vision of AWS?
(10:14) - SOAP was cool?
(16:30) - Scope: A story I've never told
(22:58) - Yin and Yang
(24:14) - Jeff freezes people
(28:23) - Sponsor: Drata
(30:06) - Thinking on your feet
(31:05) - Be like water? (no)
(31:42) - Steve is 'the closer'
(35:38) - Book causes eviction!!
(42:54) - Sociopathic leaders
(47:18) - Since you've been gone (from Google)
(52:16) - Where is Google going?
(58:57) - Will Apple call it AI?
(1:00:10) - Did you Google that?
(1:02:57) - Here's how Google wins
(1:05:48) - Bake in 'opt-in relevance'
(1:06:38) - From retirement to Sourcegraph
(1:09:27) - Humans need struggle
(1:11:19) - Why Sourcegraph?
(1:15:00) - Where is Cody going?
(1:23:45) - Steve made Jeff Bezos giggle
(1:25:44) - Grab was fun
(1:27:54) - Cody is cheating
(1:32:34) - How to be inevitable
(1:35:36) - A second prescription
(1:41:00) - Up next!

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