Thank you for finding the quote. I stand corrected. I think I misread this at the time as him saying that no one will see it, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s an interesting experience to wake up one day and see that the meaning of one of those old stories was exactly the opposite of your takeaway.
In hindsight there does seem to be some truth to this. What surprised me about the Hacker News codebase is that pg almost never cut corners. To this day I still find new features I never realized I wanted. On the other hand, pg never coded anything unless it was absolutely necessary for whatever he was trying to accomplish (or at least he presented his few public pieces of code as such), which is something I’ve had trouble emulating. Coding is just too much fun sometimes.
In hindsight there does seem to be some truth to this. What surprised me about the Hacker News codebase is that pg almost never cut corners. To this day I still find new features I never realized I wanted. On the other hand, pg never coded anything unless it was absolutely necessary for whatever he was trying to accomplish (or at least he presented his few public pieces of code as such), which is something I’ve had trouble emulating. Coding is just too much fun sometimes.