» What

bitshift is an open-source online source-code search engine, developed by programmers, for programmers. The engine currently aggregates publicly-available code from two online frameworks – GitHub and Bitbucket – but has the necessary infrastructure to quickly incorporate others, like StackOverflow and Gitorious. bitshift supports a robust query language, which allows users to search for specific languages, files, dates of creation and last modifcation, and symbols (function, class, and variable names), amongst other attributes.

Our demo video:

Our demo at the New York Tech Meetup:

» How

bitshift has an extensive back-end, roughly divided into three sections:

• indexer : finds and downloads code from online frameworks
• parser : parses newly crawled code, identifying its symbols
• database : interprets and compiles user searches into database queries

The engine was developed over the span of four months, and is primarily implemented in Python, but has parsers in Ruby, Java, and a number of other languages.

» Who

bitshift was developed by three seniors from New York City's Stuyvesant High School.