Sourcegraph: Devs are managing 100x more code now than they did in 2010

Enlarge / The profusion of Web interfaces-with shifting standards, platforms, and libraries-hasn't made software development any simpler. (credit: Markus Spiske)

Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in code complexity and management. Its general findings are probably no surprise to most Ars readers-software has gotten bigger, more complex, and much more important in the past ten years-but the sheer scope can be surprising.

Before diving into the data, it's important to understand the angle the survey is coming from. Sourcegraph's own business model is enabling code search at an enterprise scale-which means not just grep -r'ing your way through a directory, but simultaneously searching across a potentially vast array of repositories, both local and cloud, and with support for just about any language you can think of.

This sort of universal, parallel search-for example, you might query `repo:^github\.com/sourcegraph/ f:dockerfile apt-get|apk` to find all instances of Docker files installing Debian packages in a set of Github repositories-becomes increasingly important as both the scale and technological diversity of a project grows.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments