qmail was the first codebase I read that blew a lot of assumptions I had about "good code" and "clean design" out of the water.
It went its own way on a lot of things compared to GNU projects and achieved an enormous level of success for 10-15 years despite some really weird decisions. And even the "wrong" decisions, with hindsight, stemmed from a clear desire to keep creative control and a small codebase. I'd rather read well-documented "bad" code any day of the week.
Since then I've felt a bit of rebellion against standard practice is often a valuable if it's 100% aligned with the goal of your project - reinventing a wheel, ignoring portability, picking a weird language, a new storage format, that kind of thing.
For an engineer it's so easy to get sucked into assuming you should make standard, well-supported, well-understood choices that you suppress your more creative & judgmental instincts.
It went its own way on a lot of things compared to GNU projects and achieved an enormous level of success for 10-15 years despite some really weird decisions. And even the "wrong" decisions, with hindsight, stemmed from a clear desire to keep creative control and a small codebase. I'd rather read well-documented "bad" code any day of the week.
Since then I've felt a bit of rebellion against standard practice is often a valuable if it's 100% aligned with the goal of your project - reinventing a wheel, ignoring portability, picking a weird language, a new storage format, that kind of thing.
For an engineer it's so easy to get sucked into assuming you should make standard, well-supported, well-understood choices that you suppress your more creative & judgmental instincts.