Supercharging Developer Productivity With Advanced Code Search

All right, so if you're on Sourcegraph.com, just follow me. I'm Prosper Otemiyuwa. I work as a Developer Advocate at Sourcegraph. We have an agenda.

So every developer in the world spends a huge amount of time reading and writing code. In fact, if you use GitHub a lot, you discover that even when you're not with your laptop, you're on GitHub, you're trying to get notifications for pull requests, comments, and every other thing, you're doing code, right? So if you spend more time reading and writing, then you should have the tools that allow you to search for code very easily.

So we have a tool called Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph.com. That's why I said if you open your phones. If you open your phones and go to Sourcegraph.com, I like to call Sourcegraph.com the Google of code search. So this is how it looks like. If your interface doesn't look like that, you're not on Sourcegraph, please. So just cross check.

So with Sourcegraph, this is the value we offer to developers. Sourcegraph has currently indexed over 2.1 million open source repositories across GitHub and GitLab. So right now, you can search code on Sourcegraph and it gives you data from GitHub and GitLab, right? And you can also set private code across several repositories. With Sourcegraph, you can do a local search on your local IDs. You can have precise code intelligence on Sourcegraph.com. And there's a feature we have called batch changes. Instead of automating, instead of, you know, opening several pull requests to different with batch changes, you can have a file and then it can make several pull requests for you. Instead of you having to do that yourself. So it's called batch changes. And then we have two features called code monitoring and code insights. But for this talk, I'm going to be talking more about the search.

All right. So, like I said, Sourcegraph can be called Google of code search. It's literally a search engine that allows you to search all of open source code and all of your private code, right? So what are the code search patterns we have with Sourcegraph? There are three types of search you can do right now. Literal, regular expression, and structural. So let's go to literal. I know many of us are familiar with the source space component, right? So if you're onboarding a new developer or you get onboarded to a codebase and you're trying to see occurrences of a particular class, symbol, or definition, you can literally copy the codebase and paste it into Sourcegraph and then it goes ahead to search for you.

So right now, this is me placing the source space components in Sourcegraph, and it searches all of the open source code it has indexed across GitHub and GitLab. Examples are results of people that are using source space across this GitHub and GitLab. So now you can see the responses. You can scroll down. On the left-hand side, you can see all the filters and operators that you can add.

So you can search through divs, you can search through the time difference, you can also search through the committers of the code, and you can have access to how people are using certain APIs. Another API that you can talk about in React JS2 is the unstable batch of this. So you want to know how many people are using unstable batch of this in the world? How many people are really using it, and how are they using this particular API method? With source graph, all you need to do is paste it in. So if you look at the arrow, it searches within the React.js organisation and it brings you out results of every usage of unstable batch of this. From within the React code itself and every other example within the React organisation, you can get results.

Now let's go to regular expression. How many of us are familiar with regular expression? I know we probably don't use it every day, but with source graph, it allows you to flex your muscles with regular expressions. So if you understand what you're trying to look for, you're trying to look for something within your file, for example. Here I was trying to look for how people are using some of the latest versions of React by using regular expression to search via the packages of several repositories. So in the source graph search engine, I toggled on the regular expression mode, and these are the results it gives me. So with these results, you can see and you can narrow it down to get the results of how many people or how many projects are dependent on a particular version of React. So some of us here are open source maintainers, others are open source authors. You want to get an idea of how many people are using your open-source package or how many people are using certain versions because you need to deprecate certain methods or because there is a new architecture you need to work on. So with this, you can easily scroll and see how people are using the webpack, Remix Run, Visualizer. You can see how many people are dependent on a particular version of your project.

This is an example of me searching through branches. I was searching through the source graph repository, and specifying with regular expression to search within every branch that has mchap within the name of the branch. So this goes into all of the branches that have mchap within it and then searches for Ubuntu latest. With that it returns all the codebase for me. This is just open-source code. Then connect all your private repositories as well. The same results it gets you. It just searches within the scope of all the repositories that you've connected to source graph. And then we have the structural search. I think this is one of my best types of search.

With structural search you can literally take blocks of code. So you can take if conditions, try catch, a full block of code, and paste it into the Google search engine, into the source graph search engine, and it's going to give you the results you're looking for. So this is me, you know, searching through Google organization on GitHub and looking for this block of code. If not path.length. And you have the three dots, right? So it goes ahead and looks for all the types of code that fulfills this particular condition and returns them to me. So now I can see all of the projects and all of the code bases, all of the files that have this within them. And then I can keep narrowing my search, right? There's so many keywords that you can use. In fact, we have a boot out there with a cheat sheet, so I encourage you after this talk or when you're free to come down to our boot and get the cheat sheets. There's a lot of things to learn there.

So why do you actually need Sourcegraph? Developer velocity. As your team grows and you build more features, you want your developers to move quickly. Sourcegraph allows them to easily search through all your repositories, enabling new hires to start committing code within the first week. With Sourcegraph, everything is in one place, making it easy for developers to get up to speed on the codebase. It also helps with refactoring by finding all the references to shared systems across different repositories, allowing for faster progress.

Now, let's recap the search parameters. Sourcegraph offers various keywords for searching, such as 'repo' to search within a particular repository or organization, 'branch' to narrow the search to a specific branch, and 'type: symbol' to only return the definition of a class or function. You can also search within specific file types or commits. Sourcegraph is a powerful tool for discovering how certain code patterns are used across your codebase.

If you want to learn more about code search, visit learn.sourcegraph.com for tutorials on regular expression search, structural search, and more. Sourcegraph provides additional resources like an active presence on Devtool, a blog, and the biweekly DevTool Time on YouTube, where you can see different developer workspaces. You can also search for Sourcegraph podcasts. Follow me on Twitter for any further questions or discussions.