23 ms·

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

• Claudus 2y ago
  Laravel, once you get the hang of it everything just works, and using a debug bar to optimize database calls is very satisfying.
• miesman 2y ago
  V7 Unix Kernel. By far the cleanest most concise code I’ve had had the privilege to work with. Really laid the groundwork for what came after particularly BSD4.3 and beyond.
• asdgharshabro 2y ago
  Lean 4 is the best codebase I've worked on. It's a functional programming language and theorem prover that really stands out. What makes it great is how it combines programming with formal proofs. The code is super clear and well-organized. Even though it's complex, it's easy to read and understand. The documentation is top-notch, with machine-checked proofs for core libraries. It has this cool metaprogramming system that lets you generate code and automate proofs elegantly. Working on Lean 4 has been amazing - it's pushed my skills to new levels. It's rare to find a project where code, math, and logic come together so nicely. Every time I dive into the codebase, I learn something new.
• gparmer 2y ago
  Vintage answer NN (Net News) - it was a text based reader for USENET news, first released in 1984. It's been a minute since then, but I recall it to have been in C. This was before the Internet was highly monetized, and when most projects were open source, written by people who needed (or wanted) a tool, and had the combination of skills, experience, and time to make it happen. The code was good because it was well designed, and well maintained. Routines were modular and reusable. If you needed to modify something, you could find the right place to make a change, add a feature, and submit it to the repository. Maintainers did not allow crap submissions back into the published code. So yes to all prompts, with the bonus of having passionate engineers doing something they loved. I'm not sure my contributions ever made it through the "not crap" filter, but they did work beautifully for my employer. Good code is functional, understandable, flexible, and can be modified without a complete overhaul. My compliments to all who contributed to NN! https://www.nndev.org/ https://www.nndev.org/
• cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  A blank slate, so I can make the first mistake :)
  • escapecharacter 2y ago
    I agree, the best code base is always a zero-line code base.
    • alex_suzuki 2y ago
      After that first line, it’s all downhill from there… :-)
  • azangru 2y ago
    So true! I spend so much time obsessing over how what I am about to write ties in with what has already been written; or fuming over the stupidity of earlier decisions (usually made by myself). A blank slate is incredibly refreshing.
• mulholio 2y ago
  Although I'm only on job three and have not had that much involvement with open source, I think my current employer (Attio) has one of the best codebases I've seen. Qualitatively, I experience this in a few ways: * Codebase quality improves over time, even as codebase and team size rapidly increase * Everything is easy to find. Sub-packages are well-organised. Files are easy to search for * Scaling is now essentially solved and engineers can put 90% of their time into feature-focused work instead of load concerns I think there are a few reasons for this: * We have standard patterns for our common use cases * Our hiring bar is high and everyone is expected to improve code quality over time * Critical engineering decisions have been consistently well-made. For example, we are very happy to have chosen our current DB architecture, avoided GraphQL and used Rust for some performance-critical areas * A TypeScript monorepo means code quality spreads across web/mobile/backend * Doing good migrations has become a core competency. Old systems get migrated out and replaced by better, newer ones * GCP makes infra easy * All the standard best practices: code review, appropriate unit testing, feature flagging, ... Of course, there are still some holes. We have one or two dark forest features that will eventually need refactoring/rebuilding; testing needs a little more work. But overall, I'm confident these things will get fixed and the trajectory is very good.
• kleton 2y ago
  google3, all the devex tooling was taken care of by other teams. Tons of useful library functions available to import, accumulated over decades.
• chrisvenum 2y ago
  My favourite projects are small, with very focused goals and features. I have a Laravel project that I have maintained for a customer for seven years. The app is straightforward and allows users to create portals that list files and metadata, such as expiration dates and tags. Every other year, they ask me to add a new batch of features or update the UI to reflect the business's branding. As the app is so small, I have the opportunity to review every part of the app and refactor or completely rewrite parts I am not happy with. It is a joy to work on and I always welcome new requests.
  • gepardi 2y ago
    This sounds like wonderful! Maybe one day I can have a few of these “babies” that I can lovingly raise, providing joy to both the dev and the customer.
• 2Pacalypse- 2y ago
  Any codebase that I had complete control over. No, but more seriously, I've found that familiarity with the codebase is more important than having it be perfectly engineered. Once you're really familiar with the codebase, you know where dragons be, and you can make changes more easily. And God (PM) forbid, if you ever find yourself with some extra free time you might even reduce the size of dragons over time. This brings me to my final point. Any codebase that I really enjoyed working with was the one that was constantly evolving. I don't mean rewriting everything from scratch every few months, but as long as I have permission (and time) to refactor the things that have been bothering me for months as patterns emerge, I'm a happy bee.
  • sam_lowry_ 2y ago
    > Any codebase that I had complete control over. No excuses. Code ownership is important. Sometimes it works for a team, sometimes only for individuals. But not having to submit to core teams, architects and self-proclaimed experts of all kinds is a blessing. I now work for an organization that discourages code ownership, and it struggles on many fronts: 1. core teams are dysfunctional 2. people find niches and stick to them 3. top talent is leaving, although pay is good and business creates real value for citizens 4. there is virtually no horizontal communication 5. mediocre ones rise to the level of their incompetence and infest the lives of others 6. and so on and so forth... And I think the root cause of all this is lack of individual (code) ownership.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      I’ve had exactly the same issues but because I couldn’t change anything without getting approval from 16.5 code owners on every PR submitted. It’s a real pain if you start modifying your coding for ‘least code owners hit’ instead of ‘best architecture’.
      • rsanek 2y ago
        I like how my workplace does it -- there are rigorous codeowners and usually you only need approval from 1-2. if you do need approval from 5+, you can request a select 'super' codeowner review which will approve it for all.
• ysris 2y ago
  Considering the biases, the one I wrote for the company I created. When we have the opportunity to be in this context, keeping in mind what bothered us in the codebases with which we were able to work in the past, we can force ourselves not to reproduce the same errors. Like the unmaintained unit and integration tests, the lack of refactoring, other developers that use fancy technologies instead of simpler concepts more for the opportunity to play with technologies than real need.. And also, I guess, because we are more aware that the code is a reflection of the company that we want to have, that the simpler the better is a key point when we need to debug.
• anonzzzies 2y ago
  Generally code that hasn't been tested commercially. Unencumbered by pesky client driven features, just code for dreamt up features that are fun to code but perhaps will never be used.
• ethegwo 2y ago
  A Python version about core features of the Hindley-Milner type inferencer: https://github.com/ethe/typer https://github.com/ethe/typer
• donatj 2y ago
  The latest Go micro-service I have built. About once a year roughly, for the last couple years, the opportunity has arisen to greenfield a Go micro-service with pretty loose deadlines. Each time I have come into it with more knowledge about what went well and what I wasn't particularly happy with the last time. Each one has been better than the last. I've been building software professionally for twenty years, and these micro-services have been one of the few projects in that time that have had clear unified vision and time to build with constant adjustments in the name of code quality.
  • lanstin 2y ago
    Sounds fun. I have a similar policy but only every other year. It means I know what the hell I am talking about when in meetings with people who have slow or inefficient services. It also means my job of mostly telling other people how to solve problems is still a lot of fun for me.
  • intelVISA 2y ago
    Go micro-service with pretty loose deadlines Sounds like A Money Printer, congrats.
• Traubenfuchs 2y ago
  Every code base I have ever worked on was a legacy nightmare. Every "greenfield" project I joined turned into a legacy nightmare within weeks. I have never encountered enjoyable code. I had the displeasure of wading through Spring, Hibernate and Apache HTTP client code before and they were all an incomprehensible mess. My conclusion: You know the claim "any medication that really has an effect must also have side effects". I would like to adapt that for code: Any code that does a lot of useful and complex things must be an arcane, barely maintainable mess that can only be understood by deep study.
  • alex_suzuki 2y ago
    IMHO library code is especially challenging, as cruft has a tendency to accumulate, historical behavior needs to be preserved, and APIs are set in stone once they’re built.
  • lukan 2y ago
    "Any code that does a lot of useful and complex things must be an arcane, barely maintainable mess that can only be understood by deep study." "Every code base I have ever worked on was a legacy nightmare. Every "greenfield" project I joined turned into a legacy nightmare within weeks" I am sorry to say this, but it really sounds like you were either really, really unlucky, or part of the reason why it became a mess. Complicated things are complicated. Nothing can ever change that and it requires study to understand it. But it still does matter a lot, how one organizes the whole thing. How it is structured, documented(!), refactored. Are there competent people in charge who understand it all and kick peoples asses if they make even a temporary mess or forget to document, or do random people make changes wherever they see fit, because a deadline is ticking? Modularisation is usually the key. Small modules do one thing and are as seperated as much as possible with as little side effects as possible. And if one has to ship things, it is not always possible to keep it pure and if the code is not intended to live forever then this is often fine. But if the codebase is supposed to stay, then there needs to be the time to clean up the hacks. Or don't and then you end up scared touching anything. That being said, the technologies you mentioned, I would not like to touch either..
    • 2y ago
• noelwelsh 2y ago
  My open source projects. One in particular I've been working on for about 10 years. The code is consistent and always getting better, even though there is a lot more work that could be done.
• structural 2y ago
  Worked on a codebase for a large safety-critical system where everything was 100% documented, and the development guide for the project was followed so closely that you couldn't tell, across millions of lines of code, that the whole thing wasn't written by one person. Absolutely impressive levels of attention to detail everywhere, down to not even being able to find typographical errors in comments or documentation (a typo in a comment was treated just as seriously as any other bug).
  • n_ary 2y ago
    Let me guess, it was very well funded and there were no fake deadlines and cross-team dependencies, am I correct or am I very correct?
    • contingencies 2y ago
      Cancel the rocket launch people, we have a semantic incongruity! Correct is a binary state.
      • kridsdale3 2y ago
        Unless you're working with Quantum Correctness.
      • nurettin 2y ago
        If you allow for composable statements, the whole can be half correct.
      • Hasu 2y ago
        "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
    • f1shy 2y ago
      I bet you are very correct
• pavlov 2y ago
  For me, the most eye-opening codebase of my career was Cocotron, around 2007: https://github.com/cjwl/cocotron https://github.com/cjwl/cocotron I was looking for a way to port my native Mac Cocoa apps to Windows. I had been already disappointed by the aimless sprawl of GNUstep. This one-person project implemented all the essential APIs for both Foundation and AppKit. Reading the code was a revelation: can it really be this simple and at the same time this effortlessly modular for cross-platform support? I contributed a few missing classes, and successfully used Cocotron for some complex custom GUI apps that needed the dual-platform support. Cocotron showed me that one person with a vision can build something that will rival or even outgun large teams at the big tech companies. But focus is essential. Architecture astronauts usually never get down from their high orbits to ship something.
  • hannofcart 2y ago
    +1 to this. I remember my boss asking me to build a MacOS UI we had on Windows with this. I was very sceptical that it would go anywhere. But no, it worked. I was just open mouth shocked to see the GUI worked pretty flawlessly in Windows.
    • cjwlloyd 2y ago
      :)
  • cjwlloyd 2y ago
    Thank you!
• tlarkworthy 2y ago
  Google3 codebase. It's just so vast and it works. It's a miracle. I feel lucky to have seen it. Everytime you change it, it reruns the dependencies. Everyone has different view concurrently. Commits are efficient immutable snapshots. It's just incredible multiplayer. So massively beyond what can be done with GitHub. Really I feel it's peak codebase. I've not seen what the other big techs do but it blew my mind
  • asymmetric 2y ago
    What is Google3?
    • kqr 2y ago
      I would assume Google's monorepo.
      • Daub 2y ago
        This link might help... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854146 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854146 The linked pdf has lots of details.
        • erikpukinskis 2y ago
          HTML version in case anyone prefers that to PDF: https://cacm.acm.org/research/why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/ https://cacm.acm.org/research/why-google-stores-billions-of-...
    • bushbaba 2y ago
      The replacement of google2
  • arcade79 2y ago
    It was wonderful to work with. :-) It's one of the things I truly miss from Google.
  • VirusNewbie 2y ago
• cpojer 2y ago
  https://github.com/nkzw-tech/athena-crisis https://github.com/nkzw-tech/athena-crisis
• joeshachaf 2y ago
  I worked with a very experienced engineer who created his own WAF (software-based) using Java. From a purely architectural perspective, it might not be the best (I might have used an ISAPI filter back then), but the code itself was very efficient, well-written and documented. I used it several times as a teaching example.
• Agingcoder 2y ago
  I haven’t contributed code to it, but I’ve read lots of code in it ( for work reasons ) - I really like the golang compiler and library codebase. About codebases I’ve written code for, the best one strived for simplicity, and was driven by very strong engineers who actively considered code hygiene ( in the broadest possible sense ) a first class citizen.
  • christophilus 2y ago
    Go, SQLite, Redis are the three that came to mind for me. Simple, readable, fairly flat hierarchy.
• prinny_ 2y ago
  The one in my previous job, which was an admin board for a market intelligence application. Ultimately, the reason it was good was because the engineers had zero ego on top of having excellent skills. The team that set the codebase were basically 4 seniors and 3 principals (the client actually did pay for top talent in this case) so not only everything was based on industry standards, written elegantly and organized perfectly, but every time some new requirement came up, these senior / principal engineers would discuss it in the most civilized matter I have ever seen. E.g, "we need to come up with a way to implement X". Person A gives their idea, person B gives another idea and so on until everybody shared their thoughts. Then someone would say "I think what person C said makes the most sense" and everybody would agree and that was it. 30 minutes to hear everybody out, 3 minutes to discuss who will do it and when and the meeting was over. I think the biggest testament to this code base was that when junior members joined the team, they were able to follow the existing code for adding new features. It was that easy to navigate and understand the big picture of.
  • brailsafe 2y ago
    This is the approach I tried to take as an IC frontend on a building management system dashboard about a year ago. It was basically me and one other frontend, one full-stack, and a QA or 2, plus a manager. My manager I guess had written a lot of the code we'd be interacting with, and I guess was somewhat protective and reluctant to delegate authority over decisions around it. It was a big refactoring project, and I just encouraged my colleagues to take the things they wanted, like rebuilding the state management system. We'd discuss the requirements and why it was necessary, and I'd look for reasons to agree rather than disagree, then we'd be off. Something burnout has taught me is that the marginal differences between one implementation detail or another are not worth getting hung up on unless they pose a real problem, especially when someone else gets to decide that doing it fast is priority (sprints).
    • robertlagrant 2y ago
      > Something burnout has taught me is that the marginal differences between one implementation detail or another are not worth getting hung up on unless they pose a real problem, especially when someone else gets to decide that doing it fast is priority (sprints). I think this is true. And a self-imposed problem (should a problem arise) is much less frustrating to fix than one that came from a decision imposed by someone else, even if the latter avoided loads of other problems. Sometimes it's better to let people make mistakes (as you believe them to be) and correct them later.
• jmartin2683 2y ago
  Hopefully the last one you were responsible for.
• jmartin2683 2y ago
  Hopefully the most recent one you were responsible for.
• bittermandel 2y ago
  Any code base that doesn't use the advanced features of it's language(s) are always better in my experience. Heavy usage of e.g. meta-programming in Python or perhaps uber's fx (dependency injection) in Go makes projects infinitely harder to get into.
  • jamestimmins 2y ago
    Such a great point. I audibly groan when I come across Python meta-programming. While not an advanced feature, I have a similar response when I see lots of decorators in Python. They quickly become a debugging nightmare.
  • sebstefan 2y ago
    I can see a few cases where that depends... Really simple languages: Ruling out meta-programming is really going to limit you in Lua for example. Just being able to do `mySocket:close()` instead of `Socket.close(mySocket)` involves meta-programming. Older languages: For C++ the "simple" features are going to include raw pointers and macros. Maybe it's not so bad to allow smart pointers and templates to avoid those
    • wruza 2y ago
      Both of these examples are examples of an under-programmed core though. Lua is notorious for lacking batteries, so everyone has to reinvent their own. There’s literally no serious Lua program without some sort of classes, but they still resist adding them into lauxlib.
  • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Depends who is providing it. Django and pydantic meta programming usually make the code easier to deal with. In shop written meta programming usually sucks.
  • tommypalm 2y ago
    I worked at GOV.UK for a few years on what was effectively specialised CMSs all written in Rails. Mostly basic CRUD stuff. A contractor came along and built the most insane CMS I've ever seen. I found out later it was flavor of the Java Repository Pattern using dependency injection. It became so difficult to work with that the last thing I worked on there was to delete it and rebuild it using standard Rails patterns. The KISS philosophy exists for a reason and that includes over-using advanced language features just to show off.
• BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Last year I worked for a client that gave me a lot of time, money and autonomy to lead dev on a critical software rewrite. We got a small team of competent people, with domain experts to peer code with the devs. It was wonderful. We could test, document and clean up. Having people who knew the trade and users at hand removed second guessing. The result was so good we found bugs even in competitors' implementations. We also got x5 in perfs compared to the system it was replacing and more features.
  • leetrout 2y ago
    Good for you. Magical moments in careers are hard to find in my experience but they are so satisfying when you get there. Glad whomever was over this didnt just drop the "dont rewrite" joel spolsky article and fight making it happen.
    • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
      I actually was the one telling them not to rewrite, lol. But the original code was a mess of matlab spaghetti, they couldn't find a way to hire for that. Not to mention turning it into a web service was already a big hack of java parsing a raw dump of matlab datastructures that nobody dared to touch. I had to read the matlab code, and it tooks hours to decypher a few lines. Plus the language doesn't have great debugging and error handling capabilities and the tooling is quite terrible. So rewriting to python won, and for once, I must say it was a good call.
    • junon 2y ago
      Joel has since said that that he doesn't really agree with that advice anymore, at least not in the same way. Super annoying that it gets parroted over and over again as though it's the word of the lord.
      • kevin_nisbet 2y ago
        I agree it shouldn't be parroted as though it's the word of the lord, like any advice it will be more or less applicable on specific situations. I've been on both sides of the let's redesign a thing plenty of times. The balance is somewhere in the middle, it's valuable advice for what can go wrong when you don't think through the implications of the decision making process, understand how and why the system works the way it does, and what risks exist for what can go wrong with a big redesign. But like anything, if the risks are understood, then those risks can be accepted, mitigated, or rejected if appropriate, or provide guidance on why the redesign investment isn't worth the associated risks.
• simfoo 2y ago
  My past three employers code bases: mono-repos, Bazel, lots ot C++ and Python, thousands of libraries and tools, code generation and modeling tools that are fully integrated into the build, easy cross compilation, large integration tests just one bazel test invocation away, hermetic and uniform dependencies...
  • fire_lake 2y ago
    Bazel Python does not cross compile IIRC. How was this achieved?
    • simfoo 2y ago
      Python is only used for build-time tooling (modeling, code generators) and developer tooling. All the on-target code is C and C++, and only that is cross compiled (Linux, QNX, various RTOS and x86+aarch64)
• neilv 2y ago
  One of them stands out, due to being super-productive, over years, and then decades. A large system that was originally written by only two super-productive engineers (I mean real engineers, both with PhDs in an area of Engineering). And a comparably capable and essential IT person. The reasons for the super-productivity include one of the developers choosing great technology and using it really well, to build a foundation with "force multiplier" effects, and the other developer able to build out bulk with that, while understanding the application domain. Another reason was understanding and being pretty fully in control of the code base, so that, as needs grew and changed, over years, someone could figure out how to do whatever was needed. One of the costs was that most things had to be built from scratch. Over time that also proved to be an advantage, because whenever they needed (put loosely) a "framework" to something it couldn't do, they effectively owned the framework, and could make dramatic changes. When I said "costs", I mean things like, many times they needed to make a component from scratch that would be an off-the-shelf component in some other ecosystem. So if someone looked closely at how time was sometimes spent, without really understanding it or knowing how that panned out, it would look like a cost that they could optimize away. But if they looked at the bigger picture, they'd see a few people consistently, again and again, accomplishing what you'd think would take a lot more people to do. It helped that the first programmer also became the director for that area of business, and made sure that smart engineering kept happening. Someone might look for a reason this couldn't work, and think of bus factor. What I think helped there was the fact that the work involved one of those niche languages that attract way more super programmers than there are jobs. "Gosh, if only we had access to a secret hiring pool of super programmers who were capable of figuring out how to take up where the other person left off, and we had a way to get them to talk with us...") It was easy to imagine a competitor with 100 developers, not able to keep up, and at many points getting stuck with a problem that none of them were able to solve.
  • klibertp 2y ago
    I assume you avoided identifying (or even hinting at) this "great technology" on purpose, but could you persuaded to divulge what it was?
    • 2y ago
• nonameiguess 2y ago
  No name because the project code name changes with each new contract, but the first-level ground processing system for the NRO that turns raw satellite downlinks into some kind of human-intelligible files. I think a lot was just the restrictions built into the way development happens required a high level of discipline, care, and planning. Also, requirements were pretty tightly coupled to sensor platform capabilities, which are known well in advance and don't change unexpectedly, so waterfall development actually works and you don't have to deal with the chaos of not really knowing what will and won't work and customers constantly changing their minds. Code base was overwhelmingly C++, some Fortran, a lot of it was very old. It was all developed on airgapped networks, and the difficulty of bringing in external dependencies meant there largely were not any. All of the library functionality we required was mostly developed in-house, so we had extremely well-documented and stable functions available to do damn near anything you could want, with a good chance that whoever first wrote it was still there. All development had always been tied to a ticketing system of some sort that included all of the original discussion, design documents, and that kind of thing might add process overhead upfront, but it means that forever new developers can simply read the history and learn exactly why everything works the way it works. The system itself was very Unixy. In production, it was meant to be run as a server with many instances striped across high-performance compute nodes, but it did not have to be run that way. Every individual product flow could also be built as its own transient executable, so that working on a single component could easily be done locally. You didn't have to rebuild the world or spin up your own server. Performance requirements were enough that we had our own customized networking stack and filesystem in production, but nothing depended on this for function, so you could still develop and test on plain Linux with ext4. The culture was terrific. We were part of one of the big five defense contractors, but an acquisition and this program was largely still staffed by employees of the original company that had been acquired. We were de facto exempted from most of the bullshit any other program had to deal with. I don't know if that was part of the original terms of being acquired or just a consequence of having so many long-time developers that couldn't afford to be lost if you subjected them to nonsense. This was the kind of project that people intentionally stayed on and retired from because the experience was so much better than any other project you could get assigned to. Ironically, it had none of the characteristics that high-performing companies often tout. You work in private. The rest of the company, including your own management chain, doesn't even know what you're working on. You'll never get any recognition or publicity. The pay is mediocre. We weren't attracting the best and brightest from all of the world. You had to be American, have a top-secret clearance, and be geographically close enough to the facility to get there every day, so this was a pretty constrained hiring pool. I still worked with some of the smartest people and best engineers I've ever known. The upside of this kind of environment is you have no mercenaries or publicity hounds. Everyone who sticks around is a person who really loves and cares about what they're working on, and a lot of people did stick around. The sanity and organization of the code was heavily facilitated by having a whole lot of people working on it who'd been working on it for 30+ years.
• rthnbgrredf 2y ago
  The best codebase is the one you fully understand. I prefer codebases that are small enough to understand within a week. This is why I like Microservices. Large codebases can be overwhelming and even senior developers working a decade in the company of might not fully understand them. Instead, I prefer maintaining a few Microservices that our team fully comprehends, where the entire codebase fits into a clear mental model. We then interact with other codebases, that have active mental models in other teams, via APIs.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    I'm skeptical of this because I think that a well-architected large codebase should be as good as multiple microservices stapled together at the seams. But then I don't do much web dev.
    • rthnbgrredf 2y ago
      > I think that a well-architected large codebase I agree with you, but the problem is that such codebases rarely exist in practice. This is partly due to laziness and time pressure. When high standards are not maintained or time becomes a constraint, developers start to make compromises in large codebases, such as placing or connecting functionality in inappropriate parts of the codebase. This is much harder to do when access is restricted by an API (contract) between teams, as it forces communication. Additionally, if parts of the codebase are completely messed up, refactoring in large codebases can be extremely difficult due to complex interconnections with numerous other components. In contrast, with a microservices architecture, if you have 50 microservices and five are poorly designed, you can rewrite them from scratch while ensuring the new versions maintain the same API. This ensures that the other 45 services adhere to the API contract and cannot interfere in any other way.
• _kb 2y ago
  I don't think the 'code' side of code base can be considered in isolation. What makes a project objectively good (from subjective experience) is a combination of code, design, documentation, and often the humans involved.
• fer 2y ago
  One that had a sort of improvised facade/adapter pattern (it didn't really follow either) in a clearly cut multilayered and pipelined structure, with actor model bits where it made sense. The code wasn't simple, at all. It took active training of new arrivals for them to understand it. But it was very well thought out, with very few warts given the complexity, and extremely easy to extend (that was the main requirement, given constant changes in APIs and clients). We had an API, with multiple concurrent versions, that transformed requests into an intermediate model, on which our business logic operated, later targetted external APIs (dozens of them, some REST, some SOAP, some under NDAs, some also with multiple versions), whose responses turned again into the intermediate model, with more business logic on our end, and a final response through our API. Each transaction got its context serialized so we could effectively have what was an, again improvised, "async/await"-like syntax in what was (trigger warning) C++03 code. The person who engineered it didn't have formal CS background.
• Maledictus 2y ago
  Ruby on Rails. It is the only framework I have read top to bottom. Also the FreeBSD kernel, if you want to see a C code base that's quite beautiful (for C).
  • sgt 2y ago
    In this category I would nominate Django as well. It's very well designed (opinionated, but usually for good reasons). In terms of large C code bases I enjoy reading the PostgreSQL source code.
    • rc_mob 2y ago
      whenever I'm stuck on how to structure some code, I ask myself how would Laravel do it? and look up their code and structure mine similarly
      • chuckadams 2y ago
        My story is similar, but using Laravel as the canonical example of how not to structure things. Even without Facades, the internals are an impenetrable maze of magic methods, with things like Macroable adding methods from dog-knows-where. Even adding phpdoc types doesn’t work when dealing with things like scopes.
• t43562 2y ago
  I just cannot face the thought of calling any of them "best". Every one had good and bad features though. One or two were OS-sized and I think a codebase that compiles and links to 85GB of output for 20+ devices without being a total disaster inside is harder to do than a neat small python module or whatever. GOOD FEATURES: Maintenance of the build and test: I worked on tools that helped builds go faster so I saw a lot of codebases where people were not maintaining the build partly because nobody had that a s a responsibility. There was bad management of dependencies leading to build failures, poor performance, incorrect build output. Android would be a counter example to that - I don't know if people like developing in it but it was always hard to accelerate it as the maintainers fixed performance problems regularly leaving our tools with little to improve. Using appropriate languages. Writing everything in C++ was a fad at one time. All projects work better, port better, have faster build times, are easier to test etc if they use memory safe "build once" languages to a maximum (e.g. java) and unsafe ones (e.g. C/C++ which have to be rebuilt and tested for each device/os) to a minimum. IMO Android beat Symbian amongst other reasons because it wasn't all C/C++ and that meant a lot of code didn't have to be rebuilt for different devices. This made builds faster and fast builds lead to better quality because of a short dev-test cycle. Use of faster compilers over "better" compilers. Ultimate code performance and quality depends on a fast development cycle more (IMO) than on having the most optimizing compiler. GCC versus the older ARM compilers for example. Now the ARM compiler is based on LLVM and I know that happened indirectly from a suggestion I made to someone who then made it to ARM who then did it. The setup and build of one codebase I worked on was as easy as one could expect, the build errored out if you tried to use the wrong tools so you never ended up debugging weird failures because of an incorrect tool in your PATH somewhere. I made this feature happen :-D. With big codebases the tools could be included in the version control system so you knew you had the right compiler, right object dumper etc. This is another strength of Android and yet I was in a project for Symbian to do the opposite because of some utter bonehead who never touched a build in his life who was trying to make a name for himself with his slimy bosses as a "doer" and "reformer." Codebases (especially big ones) benefit a lot from some kind of codesearch/index where you could find out where some function/class/variable was defined and what version of the source base it was introduced in. BAD FEATURES: Exclusively Owned code - we need to know who understands code best and who is best to review it but I don't think anyone should have totally exclusive control. It was a nightmare for me at one job - trying to get another team to make some needed change (like fixing their stupid makefiles to work properly in parallel). We (build team) should have been able to do it ourselves - maybe including them in the PR. Sometimes ownership is entirely theoretical - nobody who wrote it is still employed and nobody among the notional owners understands it and none of them want to approach it within 100 metres in case it blows up and becomes their problem. I simply had to approach such code - no choice - but I kept having to send diffs to people who didn't want to bother to look at them. It was a case of pushing wet spaghetti and took forever to do very simple changes. Insufficient tests that run infrequently. What else is there to say? Complicated code with no "why" or "what this is for" type comments. The kind of thing you trawl around in for weeks and cannot make head nor tail of what is going on overall. Code with so much dependency injection and general SOLID that you have to bounce all over the place to understand a very simple action. Code where writing tests is an enormous ballache. In one Go codebase the reason was because somone decided that the standard Go practise of an array of test data being run through a kind of "test engine" was the only way anyone should be allowed to write tests. Hence you had to do lots of weird things to make your test cases into data. Generally we use a kind of "religious" approach to try to get consistency out of a group of people but then take it much too far. codebases without automated reformatting - so everyone wastes time arguing about line spacing or camel-case names or whatever in their PRs.
• nijave 2y ago
  I was debugging some issues with Thanos and had pretty good success tweaking the codebase to add additional telemetry. The code was fairly well organized and more importantly worked out of the box with a Makefile and IDE integration (GoLand). All it took was `git clone` and opening GoLand to get started. For C (maybe it's C++), fluentbit seemed pretty straight forward (I don't have much experience in C though)
• sibit 2y ago
  Pretty much any internal tool/TUI/CLI/library I've created. If I had to guess I'd say at most 25% of the company projects I've worked on have launched AND have consistent usage. Working hard on something just for it to wither crushes my soul but internal projects are different. They're all skunk works projects. No tickets. No project/board. No PM pushing back on how many points (read: hours) something should be. I'm solving real problems that directly impact the quality of life for myself and my coworkers. The best part is getting real, genuine, feedback. If something sucks they'll tell you and they won't sugarcoat it.
  • jftuga 2y ago
    I love this take. What language(s) do you typically use to write CLI programs? I'm also interested in learning about what types of internal TUI tools you have created.
• wruza 2y ago
  The ones that were straightforward and close to the business. It starts at the obvious, works in an obvious way and has comment blocks at hard parts. For this reason I despise most modern [web] projects, which have a weak start, immediately drop into “services” and “components”, do one action per source file per 30-50 lines of code, which are mostly imports and boilerplate, and have hundreds of these files. You can never tell what it does because it does almost nothing except formalities. I also noted a tendency to use wrong paradigms for a language. E.g. it may have no closures (imagine that in 202x) so they use events as continuations for asynchronicity, which results in a mess. Or it isn’t immutable/functional, but they pretend it is, which results in fragility. The best projects are both close to their business and written in a paradigm of the language used. Was there someone enforcing good practices top down? Natural time pressure is the best bs cleaner, imo. You write effing code, maybe have few hours a week to refactor strange parts. With no time pressure a project naturally becomes massaged by all members into the “likeable” form of their age.
• 8474_s 2y ago
  I can't name a good one, but i have strong dislike for big project codebases where even finding one file out of thousands where the relevant code resides is a challenge: its never something isolated but acts like some "component". The best i can think of is one-person projects where organization is streamlined as its actually has to be used by the author, not like a cog in a giant project.
• 999900000999 2y ago
  Realistically any code base where the engineers had at least a basic understanding of programming. You do not know suffering until you've seen someone hard code basic variables, we're talking about strings all over the place, and then they just copy the function again to replace the strings . I've legitimately left jobs over bad code. We're talking about code that did nothing in reality. The best code bases have been ones where I've been able to lead the direction. I get to know exactly how things work. I'm privileged to have a job where I essentially created the initial framework right now . Plus I'm fully remote, life is pretty good.
  • naikrovek 2y ago
    > any code base where the engineers had at least a basic understanding of programming I felt this in my soul as soon as I read it. The number of people writing code who should not even be speaking to others because of how clearly they don't understand anything technical is unfathomably high. Our industry hires seat fillers and tells them to write software. And then they do, and it's every bit as bad as it sounds.
    • withinboredom 2y ago
      Same. Some genius hired a "software architect" who doesn't know how to write code. When I asked the genius why he would do that, he said it was because regular architects don't know how to build houses, so why would he know how to program? That was some next-level shit. He showed us a diagram once where the database was calling github which was calling a microservice. These are the days before Github had a CI, so it was pretty funny.
• karmakaze 2y ago
  Probably the microservices-based one for async video messaging (i.e. Slack for video) for workers in the field. Each service was small enough that we could do a blue-green deploy to prod in about 2 minutes running only the service's tests and a tiny (intentionally limited) set of about 8 system journey tests (can onboard a new user, user can create a contact/group, user can send a common content-type message, user can receive messages, user can react/respond to a message). Every commit to main/master automatically either deployed to prod or broke the CI/CD pipeline and needed to be fixed ASAP. Each service was also well-known by team members that it literally could be rewritten in a week or two if desired to change a key part of its design.
  • karmakaze 2y ago
    Thinking about what I wrote, I suppose my criteria for a good codebase is one that has the lowest friction to change: a fast edit/run/test/debug loop, a meaningful sense of security (without dogma), and fast automated deployment/revert (via blue/green). Given those a bad codebase can become a good one again (by uncoordinated action of individuals) without everyone having to buy into a large investment.
• llmblockchain 2y ago
  Any code I have ever touched.
• ttfkam 2y ago
  Postgres. I don't code in C if I can avoid it, since it often feels like an awful lot of extra typing while still having to worry about memory safety. But the Postgres codebase is extraordinarily well organized and respects the humans that work with it with its intelligent handling of memory and judicious use of macros. I consider the core Postgres codebase to be the gold standard in development even though it's in a language I do not prefer to write in if given the choice. Shout out to the pgrx folks. You're awesome! https://github.com/pgcentralfoundation/pgrx https://github.com/pgcentralfoundation/pgrx
  • niobe 2y ago
    Not only that, one of the best documented projects out there, clear, comprehensive, consistent and findable.
  • rurp 2y ago
    That is nice to hear, albeit unsurprising. Their public documentation is some of the best that I have worked with. Postgres is such an impressive project overall.
  • shutupnerd0000 2y ago
    This codebase is 99.6% Rust according to GitHub.
    • radimm 2y ago
      That’s PGRX - not PostgreSQL
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • ttfkam 2y ago
      As I said, I don't like coding in C.
    • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      https://github.com/postgres/postgres https://github.com/postgres/postgres Postgres (core?) seems to be 85% C.
• mikewarot 2y ago
  The run time library for Turbo Pascal/Delphi for Windows was completely documented, sane, and very easy to work with. The working examples really helped. The free Pascal RTL seems opaque in comparison. Their reliance on and archaic help file build system keeps contributors away. Thus it's poorly documented at best.
  • nurple 2y ago
    Was always an Anders fan because of his work in the turbo/delphi community.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tiffanyh 2y ago
  I've seen a few people say 'google3'. Q: is it actually the code that you loved, or simply the tooling that exists? (and if it's tooling, why can't that type of tooling be replicated for other codebases outside of google?)
  • okdood64 2y ago
    > (and if it's tooling, why can't that type of tooling be replicated for other codebases outside of google?) The elegance of the tooling from what I hear is that there's tons of different tools maintained by different teams that work seamlessly (and fast) together to produce google3 and all of its supporting pieces. But to answer your question, sure it can. But good luck building your own. Google has been doing this since the 2000s. And if you're a big company already, you've already bought into your existing patterns & design choices; things like that are VERY hard to change.
  • aleksiy123 2y ago
    Its both. The tooling has a very direct impact on the quality of the code. I think the reason its not easy replicable is: 1. It takes a ton of initial investment and ongoing maintenance but its worth it when your code base is gigantic. 2. There is a consistent set of top down enforced rules. With the consistency it becomes much, much easier to build tight integrations between tools. (almost?) everything is buildable by a single build system (blaze). When anyone can consistently build/test/run anything in your codebase it becomes a lot easier to build a whole host of potential tools like code search. Probably someone can dive deeper than I can. But one thing I learned the most important property for a code base to be maintainable/scalable is consistency.
    • aleksiy123 2y ago
      One more thought, is also how much other systems can utilize the same tooling/workflows by just storing things in source code. Things that would probably traditionally stored as application state in a database are often stored instead in google3 as config. Things like on team rosters, on call rosters, code review permissions, service permissions, feature flags. All of it stored in google3 and can all utilize the same consistent set of tooling like presubmit test, integration tests, deployment automation, permissions, code search. Its sort of like Infrastructure as Code but more.
• pradn 2y ago
  Google's monorepo, and it's not even close - primarily for the tooling: * Creating a mutable snapshot of the entire codebase takes a second or two. * Builds are perfectly reproducible, and happen on build clusters. Entire C++ servers with hundreds of thousands of lines of code can be built from scratch in a minute or two tops. * The build config language is really simple and concise. * Code search across the entire codebase is instant. * File history loads in an instant. * Line-by-line blame loads in a few seconds. * Nearly all files in supported languages have instant symbol lookup. * There's a consistent style enforced by a shared culture, auto-linters, and presubmits. * Shortcuts for deep-linking to a file/version/line make sharing code easy-peasy. * A ton of presubmit checks ensure uniform code/test quality. * Code reviews are required, and so is pairing tests with code changes.
  • pjungwir 2y ago
    > Entire C++ servers with hundreds of lines of code can be built from scratch in a minute or two tops. Hundreds, huh? Is this a typo? It makes me wonder if the whole comment is facetious. Or do C++ programmers just have very low expectations for build time?
    • jbyers 2y ago
      I suspect they meant "hundreds of thousands"
      • pradn 2y ago
        Yes, oops - fixed!
    • stefan_ 2y ago
      That's the beauty of C++, an absurdly slow build is just an include away.
      • thfuran 2y ago
        Boost always helps prop up falling compile times.
• ramses0 2y ago
  It's kindof a dumb answer, but `abcde` (A Better CD Encoder) continues to be my go-to reference for "everything shell". https://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=summary https://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=summ... https://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=blob_plain;f=abcde;hb=8726dfe84907e162e4b10a23cec0832ff544c1a1 https://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=blob... ...it's just so damned... like... it _is_ 5000 lines of bash, but given the constraints and the problem domain, it's an incredible (and well-organized) feat. If I ever question "How would I do something like XXX in shell?", I can usually find some clues, inspirations, or answers in the `abcde` codebase.
  • e12e 2y ago
    > https://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=blob_plain;f=abcde;hb=8726dfe84907e162e4b10a23cec0832ff544c1a1 https://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=blob... Interesting. I was a bit surprised by the use of echo in the usage() function (and not cat and a heredoc) -- but that certainly looks like a very structured shell script. Thanks for sharing.
• paxys 2y ago
  One that was written from scratch, by me. All others are terrible.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    Heh. Can relate. Even my own codebases/config. management systems are difficult, if I haven't dealt with them in a while. However, I am pretty good at understanding old stuff I did, mainly because I leave a legacy for myself. https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/ https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/
  • wvenable 2y ago
    ...unless I haven't looked at it in a few years.
  • tiffanyh 2y ago
    The problem I have is, I'll revisit code I wrote 1-2 months prior and swear someone else wrote it.
    • pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Same. I know I wrote perfect, maintainable code that can easily live in my brain. But when I go to work on it again a few months since I wrote it, it seems like some asshole stepped in and overwrote my beautiful code with a bunch of jumbly mish-mash and had the gall to overwrite the git commit history with it, using the exact same commit messages, and my own name!
      • lagrange77 2y ago
        Right. I even quietly mumble 'asshole' while reading it.
    • takeda 2y ago
      This is the weird thing. I heard it a lot and I don't know if people just over-exaggerate or maybe I'm just forgetting things quicker, but I don't have that. I come to the code after month or two and it is the same as if I came a week or two. I also don't feel ashamed of it. I also got compliments of my code in the past. I do try to make my code readable and avoid being clever. Basically my rule of thumb is that if I need to write a comment about block of code what it does, then that code is too complex.
• ryancnelson 2y ago
  Illumos, and specifically the SmartOS distribution. Being ringside for the fork of Sun's OpenSolaris, and watching absolute geniuses steward a thing like that into a useful product and a build process was foundational for my understanding of how and why process is important, as well as how to get things fixed in the real world, while not muddying the idea of the pure design principles. A balance can exist!
• jowdones 2y ago
  >> Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on? LOL. Obviously. Mine! :)
• lanstin 2y ago
  AOL's server code was excellent. It was written by some people that had done similar things for BITNET and had a deep understanding of Unix programming and how to use event loops for scalability. It was in C, but the process was expected to run for months without crashing or running out of memory; if it had an abnormal exit, you'd (the owner as set in some code thing) get an email with the core backtrace. If it had a memory leak, ops would be on you quickly. Ops was considered a primary driver of requirements to dev, and absolutely everything could be reloaded into a running server without restarting it. There was a TCP control port where a TCL interpreter inside the service was exposed and generally you wrote the (very simple, CS 101 style) TCL commands to manage the server. It was a "No Threads Kernel", scaled to the dozens or hundreds of physical machines communicating over a very well managed network, and most 1 process per core, and 1 core for the OS. The 200 or so unix developers (as we were called) had a common understanding of how the framework worked and if you were just writing app code it was basically impossible to write slow services. We had technical writers that would interview the developers and write books that could be handed to outside developers and lead to a successful integration with no developer time spent. The NTK was primarily for sending msgs over the network - we had a principle to never write to disk (which were pretty slow in the 1990s), so everything was just a server to get network messages and then send out other messages in reponse and then assemble the replies/timeouts and send back a msg to the caller. All done over persistent connections established by the infrastructure, the applications just registered callbacks for msg type 'X' which would present one with the caller information, the msg as a buffer, and potentially a "user word" which would be a way to keep server state around between calls. The layering, from the main select loop thru different layers of TCP connection, SSL handling (if used, not 100% was SSL in the 90s), thru persistent link handling, application msg handling, timers, memory allocation, etc. was done with such art that I felt it to be a thing of beauty.
  • mrpippy 2y ago
    Fascinating, what kind of hardware/OS was used in production?
    • lanstin 2y ago
      Started with Tandem and Stratus pre Unix then migrated to HPUX then Solaris then Linux on stock hardware. Also Digital for big machines and early usage of 64 bit. I ported to Mac OSX but only for local dev. Funny thing about HPUX to Solaris migration is we found a ton of null pointer dereferences which didn't cause SEGV on HPUX but did on Solaris. And Linux migration was to a different endianness so had to fix any copying to/from ints to a buffer.
• jsrcout 2y ago
  It's refreshing to read the replies here as I am currently working in the worst codebase I've ever seen in my life. It's just unimaginably bad.
  • mythrwy 2y ago
    You must be the guy who replaced me at my last job.
• tonymet 2y ago
  Facebook but for different reasons than most. We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight A lot of effort goes into language design and tooling to enable continuous migration of code. Rather than re-writing entire repos, existing code is continuously upgraded through semi- & fully-automated code-mods. Every day thousands of patches are landed to upgrade APIs with new type safety, security restrictions, deprecations and other code maintenance. Most other company repos I worked on had major re-writes outside of the mainline until one day there was a sudden and often troublesome switch-over to the new code. Code is constantly changing, and unless you have a continuous process for landing and testing those changes, you are going to suffer when you try to apply the changes needed to address the accumulated tech-debt.
  • lanstin 2y ago
    I really wish more people believed in continuous improvement and the malleability of software. Giant heroic refactors or redos are so annoying, but so are ten year old compiler or kernels.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    > We called this swapping out the airplane parts mid-flight... I work fairly heavily with Facebook's Graph API, and I think they may have employed too many Boeing engineers for the part swaps lately.
    • tonymet 2y ago
      Most of the compatibility issues over the past few years at least have been due to added privacy restrictions and reduced permissions scoping.
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        The same few years have seen the developer bug tool closed down in favor of the mostly abandoned “community forums” no one uses. We had big multi-year bugs in “assigned” state before its closure, too.
• mrazomor 2y ago
  In my case, it was the integration testing framework built for a large Python service. This was ~10y ago, so my memory might not serve me well. A bit of context: - proprietary service, written in Python, maaany KLOC, - hundreds of engineers worked on it, - before this framework, writing the integration tests was difficult -- you had a base framework, but the tests had no structure, everyone rolled out their own complicated way of wiring things -- very convoluted and flaky. The new integration tests framework was build by a recently joined senior engineer. TBF, it's wrong to say that it's was a framework, if you think in the xUnit sense. This guy built a set of business components that you could connect & combine in a sound way to build your integration test. Doesn't sound like much, but it significantly simplified writing integration tests (it still had rough edges, but it was 10x improvement). It's rare to see the chaos being tamed in such elegant way. What this guy did: - built on top of the existing integration tests framework (didn't rollout something from zero), - defined a clear semantic for the test components, - built the initial set of the test components, - held a strong ownership over the code -- through the code review he ensured that the new components follow semantics, and that each test component is covered by its own test (yep, tests for the test doubles, you don't see that very often). Did it work well longterm? Unfortunately, no. He stayed relatively short (<2y). His framework deteriorated under the new ownership. Travis, if you are reading this and you recognized yourself, thank you for your work!
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    I wonder if this is a tragedy of "the org wasn't ready for his solution" or more of a "if I were to go back now, I'd notice it wasn't so good."
    • bornfreddy 2y ago
      Why only those two options? It could be just "the company had other priorities and developers, while they appreciated Travis's work, didn't find it worthwhile to carry the torch themselves". Having a great testing framework is just one of the things that need devs' attention.
      • 2y ago
• cwbriscoe 2y ago
  One that I built and maintained 100% on my own. Nothing like doing things the way you like to without someone else messing everything up.
• antishatter 2y ago
  Had to work through a weirdness in kubernetes many years ago when using it on prem for a project (not at google). It stands out as the best code base I have had to go through to figure stuff out.
• cvwright 2y ago
  libjpeg 6 is pretty good. It's oldschool C so it's pretty spartan, but it's easy enough to read it and follow what it's doing if you have a basic understanding of the concepts. (Discrete cosine transform, Huffman coding, etc) And it's only had a couple of vulnerabilities, in nearly 30 years of being on the Internet. That's not quite like DJB code, but it's darn close. My understanding is that it was written by a very small number of people who were experts in the field, as part of the standards process way back in the early 90s.
• brynet 2y ago
  OpenBSD. Good people, consistent style, correctness.
  • tux2bsd 2y ago
    [dead]
  • tux2bsd 2y ago
    [dead]
• JensRantil 2y ago
  The first few years at a previous startup I worked on. Java. CI/CD in place when merging PRs. But mostly, the thing that made the code base great was the fact that the code wrapped external libraries in small interfaces that were _owned by the company_, and dependency was used to not depend on implementation interfaces. In short, adhering to the basics on the SOLID principles.
  • meowtimemania 2y ago
    Kinda sounds like abstraction hell. What did you gain by wrapping all external libraries in interfaces?
    • JensRantil 2y ago
      oasisaimlessly's response says it all.
    • oasisaimlessly 2y ago
      In my experience, any third-party dependency will inevitably eventually be in-sourced. Third-party dependencies are technical debt - they let you make fast progress initially, but have recurring maintenance costs. Wrapping the API lets you see, all in one place, the surface area of an external API that is in use, and minimizes the changes required here when reimplementing it. --- Also, not that Clean Code is any great authority (but it is popular!): > [Wrapping] third-party APIs is a best practice. When you wrap a third-party API, you minimize your dependencies upon it: You can choose to move to a different library in the future without much penalty. Wrapping also makes it easier to mock out third-party calls when you are testing your own code. > One final advantage of wrapping is that you aren’t tied to a particular vendor’s API design choices. You can define an API that you feel comfortable with.
• kristopolous 2y ago
  NetBSD
• OnlyMortal 2y ago
  Used: the Boost C++ libraries. In particular ASIO. Variant has also been very useful. The Mac GUSI BSD socket library is worth a mention too. I built a multithreaded Quark XPress XTension with it that used PowerPlant for UI. Quark even wanted to interview me. Added to: a pre-Boost cross platform library for Mac (Classic) and Windows NT. It did much of what Boost did way back when.
• elwell 2y ago
  ClojureScript + Re-frame + GraphQL subscriptions over WebSockets: https://github.com/Vetd-Inc/vetd-app https://github.com/Vetd-Inc/vetd-app
• fooker 2y ago
  The LLVM infrastructure. Other compilers don't even come close.
• sunir 2y ago
  I worked on an incredible C++ codebase back in the dot.com. We built a mobile SVG renderer and packed into 128kb on a Palm 3 and similar code sizes on Blackberries, Symbian (the worst OS ever), Fujitsu phones, and whatever you threw at us. I built a few systems. The DOM, a build system that could cross compile to a completely new target phone while the phone executives were at lunch with our sales team (that’s great demo!), and an optimizing build step in Perl that rewrote the C++ to minimize bytes, cycles and joules of energy. The rendering engine was built by a genius. It was the most efficient and accurate vector graphics renderer I have ever seen. But of course no one could understand how this system worked. I mean, Perl that transpiles C++ into more optimized C++ just is abusive. I was not popular with the senior devs. The main coders including me were coop students who worked furiously at all hours for the fun of it. But of course the product had no revenue. The wiser devs probably knew this and didn’t care. Nevertheless, we eventually were let go during the dot.com bust and the remaining main engineers had to throw the code out and try to rewrite it in Java. That didn’t work because in that era Java was too slow to fit on a phone. Or maybe the market was dead. I learnt a solid lesson. What’s amazing technically is not an amazing code base. What is an amazing code base isn’t an amazing product. What is an amazing product isn’t an amazing business. Literally every product I have ever seen that is profitable is not a good code base. But if it pays me to code, I love it.
• jeffrallen 2y ago
  The Go standard library. The level of detail, the politeness of the reviews, the fact that the features of the language allowed me to put more attention into correct code than "at least it's working" code, the pragmatism and personalism of the core team.
• malkosta 2y ago
  The best codebases I worked on were from startups that failed due to lack of product market fit. Oh man, their code was so beautiful and optimized…
  • BobbyJo 2y ago
    Is this true or a bit of humor? Of the three startups I worked for, the one that had the best exit also had the best code. Ime shitty code hamstrings startups into slow execution during the growth phase, and kills them despite pmf, because competition winds up moving much faster.
    • malkosta 2y ago
      Not humor. Just a random observation I realized when I read the title of the topic.
• raggi 2y ago
  Code wise, probably Fuchsia. I worked up and down the Fuchsia stack regularly, from bootloaders to GUI programs and all over in-between. For a sizeable code base with so many layers and concepts, and regularly moving between these without much memory for what's there (as it also moved around quite quickly in my time), it was the lowest average cost of entry to new areas of most other millions of lines of code repositories I've dealt with in my career. Still plenty of bugs came up, lots of polish and more design work to do, it's not at all to over-sell it, but almost everything was approachable with low impediment. There were also lots of Ruby libraries back in the hayday of the language that were very clean for what they are. I've rarely seen programs structured so well since - some of this is essentially a forced practice by the language - if you don't do it, you'll suffer as there's no types, lsps and whatnot to otherwise save you, but still, it's worth calling out, as I think back occasionally with fond memories of being unimpeded anywhere I needed to go. Tooling wise it's got to be noted as others have that the Google monorepo was well integrated, but it wasn't what I'd describe as "best" at all. I had a fairly broad time at Google having worked in most of the sub orgs over the years and in doing so saw a lot of the variance even with the chosen integrations. I saw teams who regularly built from no where near head cherry picks out of the repo, I ended up owning stuff that always built off of the main branches (most Googlers don't even know exist) setup before my time to avoid running into otherwise hardline constraints around single version policy that couldn't be adhered to for specific product reasons (hi cloud). Exactly how much and which parts of buganizer teams used varied hugely, which service management tools they used varied, which database systems, etc. The single patch system while also fairly well integrated combined with code review practices that often stymied medium scale refactors (large refactors within a single product area), though making large scale changes that touch every single top level directory, while a bit rough on the edges of the tooling, the tooling existed and worked really well - pushes out hundreds or even thousands of patches and automates pinging owners and informing you of failures, etc. In many ways a lot of smaller systems with far less tooling, and far far less integration were more productive - I've never seen such a bad way of _organizing work to be done_, or such a poor volume management of bugs as I have at Google in various teams/areas, despite all the tooling. Any delivery that involved client programs (desktop programs, mobile programs, etc) was always pretty remarkably awful, and only very very small teams were on the hook for making any of this better. They'd always plaster their new thing with "don't you dare make another or use the deprecated thing" meanwhile they never had enough time to make the new thing ready - a common trope in the company, but really highlights there are edges outside of the "pure saas" side of the business which were pretty bad. The best part of the monorepo and monotooling culture for the saas side is the security properties of it all, which were outstanding, and are among the reasons why I still trust Google as the holder of some main accounts. I hope they never start to lose those properties given the scale and impact they could have.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• yobert 2y ago
  I tried to add a new SQL function to CockroachDB. I had never seen the source before, but since it was such nice Go code, it only took me a few hours to have a working build, with tests.
• jchrisa 2y ago
  CouchDB's HTTP API used to fit in just one file (less than 1k lines of Erlang), and it was a great jumping-off point for learning databases and web programming: https://github.com/apache/couchdb/blob/0.8.1/src/couchdb/couch_httpd.erl https://github.com/apache/couchdb/blob/0.8.1/src/couchdb/cou... It was written by one engineer, and then later refactored by a team to look like this (and many other files): https://github.com/apache/couchdb/blob/main/src/chttpd/src/chttpd_db.erl https://github.com/apache/couchdb/blob/main/src/chttpd/src/c... It's an interesting exercise to see how something grows and changes as it transitions from inspiration to real-world usage.
  • phito 2y ago
    So little blank lines, I need to breathe
• CSMastermind 2y ago
  I've seen enough code bases that I feel like I have a good spectrum from truly exceptional to horrific. The best code bases had these things in common: 1. Consistency: they had clear patterns that were followed. It doesn't matter what the pattern was; some were strictly object-oriented, some were purely functional, some used RESTful API, and others leveraged gRPC or GraphQL. The important thing was that it was all consistent across the codebase so even if you were looking at a part you'd never seen before you could still orient yourself and reason about it quickly. 2. Ownership: there was always a single individual person who was ultimately responsible for each section of code. That doesn't mean they wrote all the code themselves; they were the final arbiter on the rare occasion a truly contentious conflict arose. They also had the unilateral power to make changes within their section of the code if they felt it was needed. This was always a rarely exercised power but they could, if they had to, push a change through. There could be many such people spread out across the codebase but for each discrete part the number was always one. 3. Clear Boundaries: it was clear what each part of the codebase's purpose was, and the boundaries were rigidly enforced. Things were never tightly coupled across these boundaries. Business logic was always isolated from things like serialization/deserialization, each system was forced to maintain its own models of the world that it cared about. The worst code bases had these things in common: 1. Lack of Eng Representation: Product controlling development schedules and insisting everything is high priority and needs done right now! Project managers who always wonder, "yes but what if 9 women could make a baby in a month. Why don't we try adding more resources? Can we just try?" Business types who see software as a cost center not a profit driver. This can also happen if your engineer leadership didn't come up through software engineering but rather QA or IT or started out in academia or is just plain and MBA type with no eng background. 2. "Time saving" Tech: We don't need a database schema, we can just go NoSQL and have JSON blobs, it will save so much time! We can share models between the front end and back end, it will save so much time! Don't write SQL, use this ORM, it will save so much time! Don't think about DevOps, just use this all in one hosting solution, it will save so much time! What about this low code/no code solution? It will save so much time! 3. Misaligned Incentives: This could be because they were contractors with no stake in the company or this could be because it was a large company and there was no realistic way they'd ever be fired. Either way there were no consequences for writing bad code.
• jokoon 2y ago
  * medical imaging software to drive a X ray machine * software was relatively new, and well made. age is probably the main reason why it was good "at the time". * there were good practices in place, yes, led by an opinionated team lead, which felt like it was the main cause for such a project to work well under medical standards. I feel like I will never find another job like this one again.
• cbanek 2y ago
  The Xbox codebase was pretty good. We were doing enforced code reviews back in 2011-ish, which was a big thing at the time. There was also a good layer cake going on and a few good architects. The worst codebase by far was Outlook for Mac. It had code going back to Entourage, and was never properly cleaned up.
  • ruff 2y ago
    Ha, if you think that was bad, you should have been there when it was just Entourage ;).
  • christophilus 2y ago
    Office in general is a mess. I think it’s a good example of the fact that the sales team / marketing power of a business is the real driver of success, much as that pains me as a developer.
    • cbanek 2y ago
      I feel that Office's trouble is always backward compatibility. Which makes sense.
• didip 2y ago
  Many of the large Go codebases. Including Kubernetes. It is super easy to find what I am looking for.
• rrdharan 2y ago
  I work at Google on database systems and would still pick the VMware codebase (specifically the virtual machine monitor component). It was by far the most impressive piece of software engineering I’ve ever had privilege of perusing.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• bitwize 2y ago
  I haven't contributed to it yet, but one of my personal projects involves hacking NetBSD. Absolutely, legendarily good code base, so thoroughly documented you can actually begin kernel hacking just by reading the man pages. The code itself is really consistent and easy to read; it's pretty clear the NetBSD team enforces a consistent style as well as high standards for thorough documentation. NetBSD is how C code should be done. The other code base I really liked was QRes, ITA Software's airline reservation system written in Common Lisp. I contracted at Google a few years ago doing maintenance on this code base before it was shuttered for good. Aside from being just high-quality Lisp code, it had its own testing language that allowed new tests to be written in just a few lines or so -- tests that sent XML queries with generated data to the running system and checked for specific results in specific XPath paths. Because the system was Lisp, implementing and extending this testing language was relatively easy. Using it even more so. Truly the only system I was happy to write tests for, rather than seeing it as a necessary chore.
• fnordpiglet 2y ago
  SecDB at Goldman. There were runtime issues aplenty but the SDLC was top notch and I’ve never heard of or seen better - and it’s 30 years old. Instant deployments and rollbacks globally, you show up to work and commit to prod in the first half day. Within a week you can go on rota. It’s why Goldman was so nimble in the 90’s, and 00’s. It’s still a remarkable system but underinvestment has taken its toll after margins evaporated in 2010.
• arriu 2y ago
  Blender is incredible, harfbuzz equally so, pretty much all modern browsers do the impossible so they need to be included as well.
• bogwog 2y ago
  Open 3D Engine's codebase is pretty great: https://o3de.org/ https://o3de.org/
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Java SDK 1.0
• codezero 2y ago
  I'm not a software engineer, but the best codebase I worked on was at Quora. I attribute this to them having several years of time to build a base that was solid. That said, I found plenty of bugs, but it was just so nice to work with. Almost everything was Python. DOM, CSS, JS embedding, etc... keeping in mind this was way before Angular/React, but the system worked very similar, doing DOM diffing via a C++ service on the backend and pushing updates out over a long polling JS endpoint. On top of that the data which was read heavy went through several layers of cache that were very easy to understand (process, system, global - called L1, L2, L3 like a system as a CPU). The front-end had a "Konami code" that let you see the rendering hierarchy from the backend while viewing it from the frontend that let you also understand the caching state of each level of hierarchy that was rendered as well as all the CSS/JS handlers affecting the element, not unlike current "inspect" view of most browsers. What made this all so good? A very strong foundation that was opinionated, but which was consistent. This was ~ 2012-2014 - they had Flask as an underlying framework, and much was built out on top of Python decorators. Besides the day-to-day code - they had a bespoke packaging system, auto-scaler, and a number of other services that "just worked" - it was very different from any other startup I've worked for.
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  This is going to sound insane, but I worked on a firmware codebase at an industrial automation company that was remarkable. Everything was working against it. No RTOS. Subversion. GCC 5-point-something (I think?). It was an incredible mass of preprocessor crimes. I'm talking about #including the same file 10 times and redefining some macros each time to make the file do something different. It used a stackless coroutine library called Protothread, which itself is a preprocessor felony. And yet? It was brilliant. Compilation was lightning quick. F5, lean back in your chair, and boom, you're running your code. I understand that this kind of thing is normal for web/backend/etc folks, but I yearn for the days of sub-15 second firmware compile times. It was easy to flip a couple flags and compile it to a Win32-based simulator. Preprocessor felonies are felonies, but when you stick to a small handful of agreed-upon felonies, you can actually reap the benefits of some very sophisticated metaprogramming, while staying close enough to the hardware that it's easy to look at a datasheet and understand exactly what your code is doing.
  • jhayward 2y ago
    > Preprocessor felonies are felonies, but when you stick to a small handful of agreed-upon felonies, you can actually reap the benefits There's a saying, "Only commit one crime at a time". Knowing when to cheat is a fairly high-risk but pro move.
• agentultra 2y ago
  I never got to submitting my own patches but the Linux kernel is nice. Where I work now I get to work in Haskell. And that’s been a pleasure. Recently rewrote over 1k lines. Deployed to production with one reviewer. No issues. Just good test coverage and a great type system with no-nonsense code. Refactoring in Haskell is a heady drug. If this was C++ or even Python there would have been much more intense reviews and probably some fail-forward patches to fix things we may have missed. But I dunno. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just that good. /s
• sgtnoodle 2y ago
  A former coworker texted me out of the blue yesterday, saying he missed working on a "<my name> codebase". He specifically appreciated that "doing something simple things were kept simple." Made my day!
• Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  It was a 63kB assembly project that compiled down to 384 bytes. However, that project handled phase-locked control of a power dimmer, logged up to 2 days of power-factor stats information into an eeprom, integrated clock timers, and several user inputs. It was the smallest, and most bizarre interleaved task-structure I'd seen fit into a $0.17 micro-controller. I kind of admired that the code itself formed the delays for other areas of the multiple tasks, and essentially achieved near perfect resource utilization for actual work. Never saw anything that efficient again for several decades. =3
• theusus 2y ago
  Worked on a domain driven design code. It was simple and intelligible. Now, I want to copy that methodology everywhere.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  I’m firmly convinced that any codebase written by any 4 people in the same room is better than any written by any higher number or distributed.
  • tinco 2y ago
    You'll be surprised, I think the best codebase I ever contributed to is the Rust compiler, which is being built by a huge distributed team. Despite it being complex and me being in there for the first time, I could quickly track down a bug in the parser and fix it. As a cherry on top the communication around the pull request was top notch too.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      I’m not trying to say it can’t be good despite that factor, but if the rust compiler were written by the top 4 contributors sitting in the same room, it’d be even better (and possibly not finished yet ;) )
  • whoknowsidont 2y ago
    You could at least contribute to the thread instead of grandstanding about an opinion you have. Name the codebases.
  • f1shy 2y ago
    I’ve seen plenty of examples of exactly the opposite.
  • bboygravity 2y ago
    So NVIDIA must write terrible code?
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      That would not surprise me. There’s a reason they need all that hardware.
  • sensanaty 2y ago
• unkulunkulu 2y ago
  The one I’m working at right now! What made it great: the company is 7 years old, I work basically since inception, half year late. The codebase had some serious problems due to migrating build systems, rapid team growth and lack of proper communication while developing important infrastructure tools, lack of foresight at the start of a crucial requirement for the whole system that became clear 3 years in. Aaand… Due to unique sequence of events half a year ago we had to start everything from scratch! We could not use a line of code from the old repo ! This brought miracles out! We started designing the right things right. People started talking to each other on the global scale, without the code limiting them! The old code not only had problems on the engineering level, but it held people and team responsibilities along suboptimal interface boundaries! This is the biggest magic! After the rewrite started, all the people in the team landed exactly where they wanted and their areas of responsibility became clear and highly efficient. Some people started shining like I could not imagine. Because their organizational and communication skills were limited by a huge suboptimal codebase. Also, it is very empowering to design a system when your whole team has real experience 5 years into the future. Also, everyone turned out to be caring about code simplicity and quality, I finally feel at home. I could not wish for a better developer experience. The sexiest C++ coding time in my life :)
  • pcatach 2y ago
    Interesting! Seems like you were uniquely well-positioned to tackle the infamous system rewrite in a way that worked out great. Fixing the interface boundaries is a strong case for it despite all of the downsides (mostly opportunity cost, I'm thinking).
    • unkulunkulu 2y ago
      But opportunity cost might not really turn out to be a real factor. Code is a liability, we only would like to think that our code is worth keeping, but the reality is it drags us down by definition: more code requires more manpower to support, this is objective truth. In the old system a lot of things were really slow. I know that now half year in we already have a couple of problems solved that required me and a small team’s half a year work to solve and right now Im working on a problem that almost was not solvable at all before, I’m planning it infractructurally solved by the end of the year. Other teams say they threw away a lot of grabage that grew with the old implementation and kept only “the good parts”. A lot of work done by the teams is now offloaded to the infrastrucutre. We have remote IDE for everyone from day one instead of build-inside-docker-do-what -you-want because old build system could not be and never was thrown away overnight. List goes on
• ephaeton 2y ago
  NetBSD. The docco, the culture, the clarity and simplicity of design from first principles. The coherency of code across kernel, user-space, accompagnying material. The vibe. You may know NetBSD (if, at all) as the BSD that wants to be "portable" and may dismiss it against FreeBSD's focus-claim of "performance" and OpenBSD's focus-claim of "security". Interestingly, trying to remain wildly portable requires a cleanliness inside that is very soothing.
  • ajay_san 2y ago
    Question, I want to get into more lower level programs like compositors or docker daemon or kernels (I do realize they all are different things) but I find tech behind them so intimidating and don't know where to get started. Do you have any advice where I can learn them? I'm about to grad next year
    • spai2 2y ago
      https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/ https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/
      • ajay_san 2y ago
        thank you! I'll check it out.
• r3db34rd 2y ago
  [flagged]
• v3ss0n 2y ago
  Litertar.dev and Tornado web . Litestar code base, architecture and core design is what modern python code should be. Very clean, fully type annotated, DTO, and many cool stuff happening there.
• m00x 2y ago
  redis's C code is incredible
• purple-leafy 2y ago
  My own, lol. Which just means I need to work on more codebases. I’m making a tool to convert data schemas to SQL via a UI for lay-users. Just like https://react-querybuilder.js.org/ https://react-querybuilder.js.org/ which is basically a UI based SQL generator. For work. Except my version extends the idea much further, blending Excel like functionality with functions that can act on Fields and Rules. What makes it good? For one, it’s a from scratch project with almost no third party libraries. For two, I fortunately chose a recursive data structure to represent the data schema, and that has really worked out well. Early on I tried 4 other approaches to represent the data, but went back to recursive feeling it was the best choice. Furthermore I’m using React, but it’s heavily leveraging reducers. Specifically Groups have a reduced, Rules have a reducer, and Fields have a reducer. The reducers are linked in a chain top to bottom, where changes on a Field change a Rule, and changes on a Rule change a Group. It’s been extremely clean to work with. Because the base data schema is recursive (Groups contain groups contain groups), most of the functions that manipulate the schema are recursive. There is a real elegance to the code, each recursive function has a very obvious base case, and a very obvious recursive path. And for the final outcome, walking the query data structure and spitting out the equivalent SQL is also recursive, and feels elegant, coming in at under 40 lines. Literally as I’ve been writing this codebase, everything somehow perfectly fell into place. I was marvelling near the end that it felt like I chose all the best possible logic paths to build this somehow. I’m hoping to get the okay from work to open source it (fully open source). The only cruft of the project is the types I’m using, the interface of the code could be improved with generics
• w10-1 2y ago
  Java, because: Mark Reinhold He learned from the best.
• lolive 2y ago
  Not wanting to start a flame war, but the appearance of jquery has been an eye-opener for me. The official API of the Web was instantly outdated thanks to the incredible cleverness of a bunch of developpers. Wow … that was, for me, exactly what open source was all about.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  Unreal Engine, by far. It's not only just extremely well written in general (with your only chance of 'really' learning the engine to go through it, read comments, and the like) but it also defies the wisdom 'everybody knows.' That wisdom being that premature optimization is the root of all evil - like we're supposed to just benchmark things, see where the bottleneck is and then try to work on optimizing spots like that. Unreal doesn't do this. There are countless thousands of micro-optimizations everywhere. For one striking example there's even a fairly substantial system in place that cache the conversion between a quaternion and a euler rotation. This would never, in a zillion years, be even close to a bottleneck. But with thousands of these little micro-optimizations everywhere you get a final system that just runs dramatically better than any comparable engine. In more general terms, they've also taken advantage of the 'idiomatic flexibility' that C++ offers to create a sort of Unreal C++ language that is also just lovely to use and feels much closer to something like C# in terms of luxuries like the lack of manual memory management, garbage collection, reflection (!!), and so on. The downsides are that compile times are horrible (even though a cached compile might only take 10 or 15 seconds, it feels like forever when trying to work out one specific issue) and C++ intellisense, especially in a preprocessor heavy environment, is pretty mehhhh.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    > there's even a fairly substantial system in place that cache the conversion between a quaternion and a euler rotation I hope that does show up on a benchmark though, cause that sounds complex
    • somenameforme 2y ago
      It definitely would not. The rotation either way is a mixture of up to ~20-30 primitive basic floating point operations, and a few geometric (sin/cos/etc) operations, and you only need to do it in the cases where you're actually going between both systems, and more than once. It's difficult to even ballpark, but it's highly likely that the caching gives anymore than a fraction of a percent of performance boost, like 0.5% or whatever. But now multiply that over hundreds to thousands of similar little 'premature' optimizations.
• ecuaflo 2y ago
  The one I made from scratch after iterating over 3 years. You can see the technologies here [0] [0] https://gitsell.dev/u/bitofbreeze/r/bitofbreeze/git-sell https://gitsell.dev/u/bitofbreeze/r/bitofbreeze/git-sell
• hightechnical 2y ago
  For me best code base I've read so far is Redis code. Feels like a poem to me.
• liampulles 2y ago
  The best codebases have been my own, because I can monopolize the style and design to my own exacting vision of how things should be. The best work codebases are ones where I may disagree with a lot of the style, but the lack of enforcement at the level of classes and functions gives us creative freedom, builds mutual respect, and enables ego-less, pragmatic, tradeoff-driven discussions about things which are actually important. If these discussions end with a majority but not universal agreement, then its fine, the minority is not offended, and we happily continue with our work. That might also be because we're all pragmatists and somewhat cynical of shiny things, or the latest fad.
• jhon-crypt 2y ago
  The best codebase I've ever worked on was when I started software development officially, I had zero knowledge of the stack for real, the codebase was run by just 5 mid level engineers, but based on how well structured and understandable it was, i was able to pick up the stack without reading a tutorial or a documentation, i would later read up on it when i started doing complicating stuff tho, but it's important for engineers to write good code to the extent that another person reading it does not have to look up something just to understand why this does that, and how stuff works in the code
• nxicvyvy 2y ago
  > Just being in a group of great engineers Is such ego. There is almost certainly someone in the group or behind the group enabling this greatness to take place.
• cjk 2y ago
  Probably WebKit. I worked on Safari, and while I had to make changes to WebKit very infrequently, the quality of the code, tooling, and team were excellent. I haven't seen that level of engineering excellence anywhere I've worked since -- it was consistent and pervasive. No one had to enforce that culture from the top because everyone bought into the vision.
• raymond_goo 2y ago
  Doom3: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3 https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3
• jokethrowaway 2y ago
  The best codebase I've worked on was a 3D editor built using the waterfall method (written in Qt and C++). Most of the engineers were above average. Everything was planned carefully in advance and documented carefully, down to individual requirements. We even had some nice to have, optional requirements. After literally weeks of just documents and iterating on the architecture, the code for it was written easily in a week basically in auto mode - if we had AI agents back then we could have had the AI agents write the implementation. During the implementation we realised there were some technical shortcomings (eg. number of lights supported by the engine) and clients wanted some changes, so we had to update our bible documentation and do a few changes. Some were small, some required to swap completely the rendering engine but we managed to keep everything to the same interfaces we planned at the beginning because the architecture was rock solid and we thought carefully about extensibility. It may have costed more in engineering time than if we threw requirements on a kanban board and iterated on them - but then we would end up with arguably a worse architecture and no documentation.