“I wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API,..."
A quote like this gives hope to all of us.
No matter how complex or massive the software, it's surprising to find out it was written by one or two people.
I see this all the time. I once implemented an ERP package in a $100 million company. I called customer support and got one of the 2 guys who wrote the package! I couldn't believe it.
Believing that one or two people can code something large and awesome is often the first step to doing it yourself.
I don't want to minimize their achievements, but it never takes one or two people to build something that large. There is an entire organization to support their efforts -- sales, customer support, QA, etc... There is a tendency to "hero"-ize developers in big companies, but at the end of the day it is an organization-wide effort.
Even so, that usually applies only up to a certain point in time. Once the company is big enough, they'll hire an army of maintenance programmers to continue improving the software.
For example, Tom Proulx wrote the first version of Quicken basically singlehandedly, but it's probably a whole department inside Intuit working on it now. Paul Buchheit is normally associated with GMail, but the GMail team is huge. Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of Linux, but hundreds if not thousands of people have contributed patches.
This article is filled with some ... interesting statements:
Lucovsky has been an integral part of Google’s APIs, including the all-important Search APIs.
Would anyone characterize them as all-important? Also, this:
Lucovsky was also the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm project to port older Microsoft products into .NET. It’s a project that’s be named as a precursor to the current open web movement.
"Just tell me it’s not Google," Ballmer reportedly said according to court documents (for a case surrounding another Google ex-Microsoft hire). When Lucovsky said it was Google, Ballmer allegedly picked up a chair and threw it across the room.
What he apparently said next, will live on forever in Internet history.
"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google."
Anyone else remember the old TNT made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley? This kind of melodrama always reminds me of it.
A quote like this gives hope to all of us.
No matter how complex or massive the software, it's surprising to find out it was written by one or two people.
I see this all the time. I once implemented an ERP package in a $100 million company. I called customer support and got one of the 2 guys who wrote the package! I couldn't believe it.
Believing that one or two people can code something large and awesome is often the first step to doing it yourself.