Our documentation serves two audiences:
Historically, Sourcegraph defaulted to making most content public. This worked well when we were smaller and the risk of oversharing was lower. But over time, the cost of having content spread across multiple places—some internal, some public—started to outweigh the benefits.
To keep things simple and reduce confusion, we now take a more intentional approach:
Most content should live in your internal teamspace, with only select content published to the public handbook.
This helps us stay fast, focused, and intentional about what we share and why.
We’ve always believed in working in the open—and that hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the scale and complexity of our work, the sensitivity of some of our strategy, and the market environment we’re operating in. Today, openness still matters—but so does focus, clarity, and protecting the integrity of our work as it evolves.
We still publish a meaningful set of policies, processes, and cultural practices to our public handbook—especially the ones that help candidates and contributors understand how we work. But the default is now internal, and that’s by design. It makes things easier to manage, and it ensures we’re sharing with purpose, not just out of habit.
The public handbook is for content that serves an external purpose—primarily to help with recruiting and to share how we work at a high level.
You should publish content to the handbook if it: