At this point, if I get sick, the code doesn't move much. If I were permanently disabled, this someone else could take over. I have people contribute bugs, tests, and other things fairly often. If you had to temporarily work on the code base and weren't familiar with the background of the project, I would say you'd be lost. It's just not the sort of thing that you can start tweaking things here and there so easily, because almost everything that needs changing is a matter of addressing architectural or serious questions that require you to really understand the project. Because of the way the code is written, there's basically no "code monkey" type work. That means that you only do meaningful work, but it also means that only people who are knowledgeable architects can work on the code. You can imagine the same thing in other code bases. Imagine that you didn't need any of your lower-level programmers anymore for work because there was nothing for them to do. Now imagine how the bus factor changes on the code when only your chief architects are necessary for working on that code base. That's very nice in one dimension, but it does create quite a different picture.

You're right about the code examples. I figure that people were already posting some code snippets. I wanted to give the big ideas rather than any specifics. The reason for this is basically that if you take any single line of code out of context, it's a bit hard to explain why I'm doing the things that I'm doing. It's very much a macro design, which is why I am offering the live session to go through. It's sort of, but not quite, an "all or nothing" thing. if you let me sit down with you and go through the entire code base, then I can explain how it all fits together and why things are the way they are, but if you just take a single piece of code out, you're missing the picture.

If I took a single compiler pass, out, for instance, you'd have between 1 and 12 lines of code to look at. I could explain a few features, but how would I explain that when you look at this piece of code you're able to see it entirely in context? Well, I can't, because the code it completely out of context at that point. Or what about demonstrating how the naming conventions exhibit structure informative regularity? Again, I can't, because that's a visual design element of the code. It's something you have to "see" by looking at the whole painting as it were.

The naming convention is actually a great example. Out of context, there's apparently no rhyme or reason to it. But in context, it forms a key component to the visual regularity and continuity throughout the code. The names are an important part of how you can see the structure of the code. It helps to orient you in the big pie. But if I were to quote a single line here, there's now pie to look at, no sky to navigate by. It's just a single constellation. By analogy, it does less good to say, here's the Big Dipper, it's useful. But why? Because it's easy to find amidst the context of starts and its shape helps you to find the North Star. But on its own it doesn't seem as valuable. At that point it is just another constellation. The same thing happens with this code.

So I'll go through and explicate it all in detail in the live session, where I can provide the "painting" and workflow in its entire so people can see how it works. Then you can see how my comments here match up with the code.