Many years ago, I remember being absolutely enthralled by learning about how the first version of Photoshop was developed by the brothers, John and Thomas Knoll

Many years ago, I remember being absolutely enthralled by learning about how the first version of Photoshop was developed by the brothers, John and Thomas Knoll, in Dr. Dobb's Magazine. "Tom is really a super programmer. He's one of the best engineers I know. He just wrote this terrific, great code." "It became much bigger than we thought it would, but it kept getting better and better." The original source code (thank you, Computer History Museum!!) http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-... One of the characteristics of brilliant engineers (and engineering teams of the likes of Jeff Dean's) may be that that they create the opposite of technical debt as they work... > From the time he decided to stop school until Version 1.0 shipped was almost two years. It became much bigger than we thought it would, but it kept getting better and better. Tom is really a super programmer. He's one of the best engineers I know. He just wrote this terrific, great code. Version 1.0 was a usable tool largely because I was trying to use it to solve real-world problems. I would run into something that would just stymie me. There's got to be a way of doing this, and then Tom would scratch his head and go, "That would be hard." He would think about it a while. I would talk to him a few days later and he would say, "I was thinking about that and I had this great idea." I was goading him a little bit, too. I would say, "You know what I really want to do? I want to make one of these selections so that I can like select some area and then the paint only affects just the area selected." Tom would say, "Oh, thats going to be impossible to make that go real time. It's going to be really slow." I'd say "Oh, come on, Tom. I'll bet you can do that." About a week later he would say, "I was thinking about it, and I think I've got a way." It was often a whole lot of exchanges like that where at first Tom thought it would be really hard, but he would keep thinking about it. He's brilliant that way, and he would come up with a clever solution to the problem... "A Conversation with John Knoll" http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410606 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410...