I never found out if Yegge was talking about Jeff Dean here, or maybe Urs Holze:
At first it's entirely non-obvious who's responsible for Google's culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work.
But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google's engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there's one superheroic dude who's keeping us all in line.
And why couldn't it be that way? Those people exist when companies start, you probably met a couple of them.
I don't know who Yegge meant, but my read on that passage (as a Googler) is that he was talking about Craig Silverstein. Several of those items are definitely attributable to Craig.
Agreed. Craig never exerted much technical influence (beyond the early years, I assume), but was always a strong cultural force in the areas of engineering quality, code reviews, readability, consistency, etc.
At first it's entirely non-obvious who's responsible for Google's culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work.
But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google's engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there's one superheroic dude who's keeping us all in line.
And why couldn't it be that way? Those people exist when companies start, you probably met a couple of them.