Empowering productivity, enhancing security: How Sourcegraph transformed Nine’s development workflow

Conor Holmes, Engineering Manager of the Productivity team at Nine, reveals how Sourcegraph products have revolutionized their development workflow, resulting in increased developer productivity, efficient code management, and enhanced security. By leveraging advanced Code Search and Batch Changes, Nine predicts Sourcegraph will save 30 developers from their Platform Engineering team up to 1200 hours annually and $276K in savings during six months of usage.

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Sourcegraph's Code Search offers valuable advantages to Nine's developers. It provides faster access to information within their extensive codebase, empowering them to make informed decisions. Additionally, Code Search plays a crucial role in identifying potential vulnerabilities, enabling rapid and scalable fixes for enhanced security and peace of mind.

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Challenge

Before Sourcegraph, Nine’s developers weren’t able to search for code patterns and dependencies across their repositories. The search capabilities across their hundreds of repositories were limiting, making it time-consuming to find crucial information.

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Updating and maintaining the application code became increasingly challenging as Nine's platform expanded by integrating numerous microservices and tools. Engineers faced the daunting task of manually creating hundreds of pull requests to implement uniform changes across their repositories.

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Batch Changes ensured a large-scale IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and CI/CD refactoring effort at Nine’s platform and helped their developers manage significant code duplication across multiple repositories due to the distributed nature of their microservices architecture.

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Solution

Nine implemented Sourcegraph's advanced Code Search, Batch Changes, and valuable code monitoring features to overcome these challenges.

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Sourcegraph's robust search capabilities empowered developers to pinpoint relevant code snippets, manage dependencies, and access critical information dispersed across multiple repositories and code hosts.

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Implementing Batch Changes was a paradigm shift in code maintenance for engineers. Instead of creating hundreds of PRs for uniform changes, engineers automated their workflow through scripted batch changes for repetitive tasks. This saves a substantial amount of time and reduces the risk of human errors during the process.

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The adoption of Sourcegraph resulted in a remarkable boost in developer productivity. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) spent less time on manual tasks and gained enhanced context for their code changes, streamlining platform maintenance. Previously, disseminating vital information across the organization took time due to its scattered nature within the vast codebase. Sourcegraph bridged this gap, enabling seamless knowledge sharing.

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Deployment

To deploy Sourcegraph, Nine’s platform team runs their infrastructure primarily on AWS and Kubernetes. Hosting Sourcegraph with AWS cloud brings numerous benefits and results to their development team. For instance, they gained a scalable and efficient environment to host Sourcegraph, enabling them to spin up small clusters quickly and manage them seamlessly. The integration with AWS services, like Aurora database and logging, further enhances their development workflow.

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Results

Nine's adoption of Sourcegraph is proving to be a game-changer for their platform engineering team. Implementing Sourcegraph on the AWS cloud was pretty straightforward, and deploying it to their Kubernetes cluster.

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Sourcegraph's global search functionality eliminated the need for manually cloning repositories or complex scripting. The platform empowered engineers to query the entire codebase, driving efficiency and team collaboration.

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“Sourcegraph helped me answer a question in like 5 seconds flat this afternoon. Normally I probably would have bugged a bunch of people, but the overview of “here is that snippet, and the list of repos using it” made it self-served.”

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— Todd TurnerPlatform Engineer, Nine.

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The insights gained from Code Search helped them identify and fix large-scale code changes. Batch Changes significantly reduced the time by automating opening changesets across multiple repositories and codehosts.

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With Sourcegraph, Nine Engineering has enhanced developer productivity and better team collaboration. Learn more about Sourcegraph and how we can improve your engineering operations by signing up for a demo today!

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