It's not like every contributor (or even committer) understands all parts of the code base - I certainly don't. People usually start by writing external code (e.g. by writing extensions in C), learn the code style and basic constructs (memory context management, data types, etc.) and then gradually expand their knowledge by working on stuff closer to core and/or reviewing stuff that interests them. At least that's how it worked for me and a couple of people around me. I don't think it's particularly specific to Postgres.

Regarding the high quality, we don't do anything magical - we simply apply well-known tools in a careful and methodical way.

1) careful reviews - Not just the code, but appropriate tests, comments and docs, and most importantly overall design/direction. It's not uncommon to reject the patch on the basis that there's a better approach, and get it reworked from scratch. Evan patches from the most senior contributors generally go through it too (with the exception of bugfixes, ...).

2) not accepting technical debt - No quick hacks that would make our life harder down the road. No features that are arbitrarily incompatible with other features. No compiler warnings.

3) incremental development - Split large patches, even if it means it's not really useful initially.

4) testing - We have a range of tests, that are executed on a variety of machines/platforms/compilers ... (https://buildfarm.postgresql.org/)

5) adopt useful technologies - static analysis, test coverage, valgrind, fuzzing (sqlsmith found quite a few bugs), ...

6) attention to bug reports / fixing them promptly (instead of just stashing them somewhere forever)

I'm sure there are many additional things contributing to the quality. In any case, there's no secret sauce, except for applying those principles consistently.

Thank you very much! I stand to gain much from your thoughtful answer. Recently my career took a big downturn. I got laid off and found it hard to get a programming job. I am doing production support now. I feel great despair that I don't measure up as a programmer anymore. I need to get back my programming skills but I am confounded by the huge complexities of the current stacks.