What is a developer platform?

Today, many developers just use a code host, often with issue tracking and basic code reviews. But the most elite software development teams use a developer platform that includes much more, enabling them to ship better software faster.

A developer platform is the one place where developers and DevOps teams go to answer questions about code and systems. It ties together information from many tools, from repositories on your code host to dependency relationships among your projects and application runtime information.

Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft, Yelp, and other elite software organizations rely on developer platforms, not just code hosts.

A code host is no longer enough

Historically, the code host (such as GitHub) was the development platform. But the most elite software development organizations such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft, and Yelp realized that a code host isn't enough:

With more code and more repositories, cross-repository code search is necessary.
With more internal libraries, services, and APIs owned by disparate teams, code navigation across packages and repositories is necessary.
With faster development cycles and more intricately connected systems, developers need to understand how a change affects other components in code review.
With more tools collecting error and performance data about code, developers need to see rich inline information on code files and reviews.

A developer platform helps answer your team's questions

For developers

How do I use this function or service?
If I change this, what could break?
What's the right library or service to use for this task?
How (and where) is this feature implemented?

For DevOps teams

What recently changed in the code about X that broke it?
Tell me whenever code is committed that makes a DB connection.
What's the performance of this line of code in production?

For engineering leaders

Ensure that everyone who interacts with this code can answer these questions on their own in a single place.

The new standard for developer platforms

A developer platform must have these things. Anything else is just a code host.

Code

One place to search, navigate, and analyze all of your organization's code (subject to user permissions)

Intelligence

An understanding of the structure of and relationships in your codebase, not just the raw text

Platform

Deep integrations with your other tools for viewing code (code host, code reviews, and editors) or collecting data about code (logging, monitoring, static analysis, etc.)

The most elite software organizations use a developer platform

Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft, Yelp, and other world-class companies rely on a developer platform (not just a code host) to ship software.

Google CodeSearch (internal-only tool)

Used 5-10 times daily by almost every Google technical employee for the last 10+ years
98% of developers say it is "critical" to their job (in a Google developer survey)
$100Ms invested, with dozens of full-time engineers building it
Use cases and value are documented in a Google internal research study

“[It's] essential to be able to easily search [the] whole source … huge productivity boost: easy to find uses, defs, examples, etc.”
— Jeff Dean (Google Senior Fellow)

Facebook BigGrep/TBGS (internal-only tool)

Used daily by almost every Facebook technical employee for the last ~8 years
More secretive than Google's tool, but is described in a conference talk and some tweets
$100Ms invested, with dozens of full-time engineers building it

“tbgs is the StackOverflow for Facebook engineers”
— Facebook engineer

Sourcegraph
Used by Uber, Lyft, Yelp, and more

Every developer at these organizations uses Sourcegraph
Used by the world's leading technology companies (except Google and Facebook, which built their in-house tools 10+ years ago for $100Ms+)

“Seriously, Sourcegraph is the best tool we’ve invested in. It’s made me insanely more productive and efficient at writing code here. I’m able to understand and deeply dive through all of our microservices and get my work done really fast. This is absolutely incredible.”
— Lyft engineering manager