Steve Yegge ported Ruby on Rails to JavaScript, line by line, over six months. Wow.
He has a post recapping his Foo Camp presentation here. Here’s one thing he mentions:
I hope you’re beginning to see, at least faintly, why I love working at Google. It’s because the code base is clean. And anything that takes more than a week of effort requires a design document, with specific sections that have to be filled out, and with feedback from primary and secondary reviewers of your choice. The net result is that for any significant piece of code at Google, you can find almost a whole book about it internally, and a well-written one at that.
Anyone seen an example of one of these documents? I’d love to incorporate such a process into my own work. In most cases, design documents are something that nobody uses. Are Google’s friendlier than most? What’s the scoop?