_THEN_ I want developers from that company to share their opinions about how they do it. Do such companies/products even exist? Software is so bad these days that maybe no existing software lives up to our ideals.
> I want to see a company deliver high-quality products with very few bugs at a fast cadence, and continue to make major changes long into the future without slowing down.
you want eat cake and have cake.
Beware of survivorship bias.
For every successful company using a technique, there might be 10 others using the same technique but running into the ground.
And not sharing the embarassing failure.
Microservices strike me as a pertinent example. It might fit huge companies very well, but not if your customer base might as well be served by a cheap Raspberry Pi.
This selects for complexity, not finished product.
We've seen a lot of one-man or small-team companies do some pretty amazing stuff, because usually they are solving a problem that they have. If you're high on VC cash (or are trying to get high on VC cash), the problems you are trying to solve is more marketing than technical.
Jeff Robers and Casey Muratory used to do a podcast called the Jeff and Casey show where they'd occationally discuss software products shipped by RAD.
One such episode details the maintenance of a garbage collector RAD shipped, which Jeff denounces as way too complicated and (IIRC) not worth the developer time or CPU cycles.
Complexity bad.
I think maybe Reaper fits the bill. http://reaper.fm/
As far as I can tell, it's two people.
sometimes that bug free thing that just works and was written all by one guy is just a real pig behind the scenes, but hey, that guy always knew what not to do, no matter how messy the APIs.
Methodology stuff sometimes comes from people who don't seem to code much at all, or haven't for a long time. I don't really read those things often and when I do I tend to skim them out of boredom.
Software design, architecture and paradigms are a mixed bag. There is plenty of distracting stuff there, and much is from people who again, don't code. But there are a bunch of rare gems in this area, even coming from academics/teachers or veterans who haven't been in the trenches for quite a while, but have plenty of useful things to say.