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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Wow, only 6334 lines of code? I find that to be shockingly small. It's less than projects I've worked on by myself for 4 or 5 months, which is nuts considering they've (presumably) had 5+ engineers working on Next for a year now.

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I worked pretty much alone on the code base for the first three months. Then we were two people for another three-ish months. Then the last four months or so we've ramped up the team to have 4-6 programmers on, depending.

But we're also ruthless about keeping the code base small. In the beginning I would go through the entire code base every week and prune it. I still read through the entire thing every now and then and make sure there's no excess fat.

Ah, makes sense. I didn't realize you guys keep things so small. Is Next going to have an API when it launches? And if so, do the stats posted include lines of API-related code?

EDIT: And since I'm already asking so many questions, how do you guys feel about supporting older versions of IE?

Yes, we're launching with an API. The code stats include those for the API.

We will not support old versions of IE. We support IE9+.

Cool. It's pretty impressive to fit an API in there, too. Do you guys subscribe to the method of building your app on top of your own API? Or do you place more of a priority on speed?

It's Rails, so presumably the API will be one with the (regular) code for the most part.

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