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Google has heaps of horrible code. The problem with lots of small isolated CLs and little time invested in revisiting broader architectures.

Then they’ll finally rewrite the thing some day, after a massive and often unnecessary design doc filled with needless bike-shedding that ultimately proposes an overengineered solution to help the person make L+1.

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The things that always blows my mind is how every individual piece of code you read has good, clean, well documented, well tested code. But overall it's just a big mess.

Not everything, though. Infrastructure code and libraries are usually very high quality and very nice to work with.

That first paragraph resonates 200%.

As long as you’re only looking at like 30 lines it’s lovely. Then you zoom out to view the beast.

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