[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yes, I've been writing it alone, but my "alone" work is at a different level, from what many folks do. Approaching every bit of work I do as "ship," is one of my oddities. I have as much fun, shipping, as I do writing.

I consider everything I do, "engineering." Been doing that, all my adult life.

Feel free to look at the stuff I do (I link to it in my HN profile). The app I'm working on isn't there (yet), but a number of its components are. It's still "under wraps."

[grepfru_it]

I hear you, but this problem becomes exponentially harder as your engineering org grows.

I witness on a daily basis PRs that have no body getting merged with absolutely zero comments and a blanket approval as long as it passes our (broken) CI pipeline. I witness obvious poor quality in the code, but engineers want to seem like they are working and will just blanket approve PRs, while i'm in the middle of writing up my code review denying the PR.

If you are a developer on a team and want your codebase to be high quality, you end up no longer writing the code and instead spend all of your time gatekeeping via code reviews. This leads to burn out.

[gkrimer]

Please come work at Google! This place has the best overall code quality I have ever seen. That's not to say it's always great or bug-free, but it is almost always well maintained. There is very little dead code. Giving and receiving high-quality code reviews is the norm.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That’s one company that would almost certainly not have me, but I very much appreciate the thought.

Apple also displays extremely high quality code, in the areas that are exposed to the public.

I have not seen too much Adobe code, but I’m told you can eat off the Photoshop codebase.

For myself, I need to keep my scope fairly humble, but I get great joy from it.

It sounds like a gratifying environment. Good show!

[grepfru_it]

Hey, I found your email on another thread.. I will reach out!

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yeah. It can be a real challenge, ensuring quality on a team.

The obvious answer, is to hire experienced, skilled, capable engineers, and instill in them, the same reverence for Quality that you have.

Like I said, Quality is expensive. Very few companies like to pay the premium.

[grepfru_it]

This does not work at scale. My company does pay the premium and a lot more.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It does, but it ain't easy. I worked for a company that did it at scale.

[stopnamingnuts]

I wonder if the nuance being identified by the other commenters might be the tragedy of the commons that can play out in collaborative settings. I'm right there with you, btw. Mine is also a non-sexy, non-commercial app and I'm happily a one man band. But a younger me, a junior member of a team, under pressure without close supervision would probably commit a certain amount of half baked spaghetti and be part of the governance problem.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yup.

It's not exactly a "one-man show," but I'm the chief architect, and the only one developing one of the three servers the app uses (I was also the original architect for another server, that is now being run by a different open-source team), I am also the only one developing the native iOS application. I may be writing some adjunct apps, once the main one has been released (like Watch, Mac and TV apps).

But we're a team. It's a 501(c)(3), with a mission to Serve a specific demographic. We have the advantage of being intimately familiar with the demographic. So far, we haven't had to shell out much. If they decide to write an Android version, then it may take some extra dosh. The good news is, the app is in "constant ship" state, so asking for funding is fairly straightforward. We just need to loop the person into the TestFlight group, and Bjørn Stronginthearm is your uncle.