Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?

Re:Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on? by bbor on Friday June 28, 2024 @04:32PM (#40824977)

I’m just one incompetent dev, but I’ll throw this in the convo just to have my perspective represented: every individual part of the google code experience was awesome because everyone cared a ton about quality and efficiency, but the overall ecosystem created as a result of all these little pet projects was to a large extent unmanaged, making it difficult to operate effectively (or, in my case, basically at all). When you join, one of the go-to jokes in their little intro class these days is “TFW you’re told that the old tool is deprecated, but the new tool is still in beta”; everyone laughs along, but hopefully a few are thinking “uhhh wtf”.

To end on as nice of a note as possible for the poor Googs: of all the things you bring up, the one I’d highlight the biggest difference on is Code Search. It’s just incredible having that level of deep semantic access to the huge repo, and people were way more comfortable saying “oh let’s take a look at that code” ad-hoc there than I think is typical. That was pretty awesome.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on? by aleksiy123 on Friday June 28, 2024 @05:07PM (#40825320)

Imho the reason for the deprecated and beta thing is because there is a constant forward momentum.

Best practices, recommendations and tooling is constantly evolving and requires investment in uptake.

I sometimes feel like everything is legacy the moment it's submitted and in a constant state of migration.

This requires time and resources that can slow the pace of development for new features.

The flips side is this actually makes the overall codebase less fractured. This consistency or common set of assumptions is what allows people to build tools and features that work horizontally across many teams/projects.

This constant forward momentum to fight inconsistency is what allows google3 to scale and keep macro level development velocity to scale relative to complexity.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on? by bbor on Friday June 28, 2024 @05:58PM (#40825701)

That’s all well said, thanks for sharing your perspective! Gives me some things to reflect on. I of course agree re:forward momentum, but I hope they’re able to regain some grace in that momentum with better organization going forward. I guess I was gesturing to people “passing the buck” on hard questions of team alignment and mutually exclusive decisions. Obviously I can’t cite specifics bc of secrecy and bad memory in equal amounts, so it’s very possible that I had a distorted view.

I will say, one of the things that hit me the hardest when the layoffs finally hit was all the people who have given their professional lives to making some seriously incredible dev tools, only to be made to feel disposable and overpaid so the suits could look good to the shareholders for a quarter or two. Perhaps they have a master vision, but I’m afraid one of our best hopes for an ethical-ish megacorp—or at least vaguely pro social—is being run for short term gain :(

However that turns out for society, hopefully it ends up releasing all those tools for us to enjoy! Mark my words, colab.google.com will be shockingly popular 5y from now, if they survive till then

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Re:Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on? by kridsdale3 on Friday June 28, 2024 @07:40PM (#40826544)

I guarantee you that the master vision is exactly what you wrote.

Google is not a software company, it is an advertising system providing cash-flow to a hedge fund that comprises a large part of every pension and retirement fund in America. It's far too important as simply a financial entity to risk anything on ....product development.

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