The 1000x Google Maps Engineer

Reminder that Google Maps only exists because of one 100-1000x engineer who rewrote all the code in one weekend PB: Yeah, so Bret was the original PM on Google Maps, and Google Maps, people, you'll see, again, on Hacker News, like, Oh, Google just acquired it and launched it. But the thing that they acquired was actually a Windows app. The original... the startup that they acquired had a Windows app that was the mapping thing. It wasn't even web based. So, they converted it to be a web based thing. And then, the story I always remember with Bret that I think is super impressive, is that, internally, the Google Maps wasn't very good. It was just like this horribly slow and clunky thing. And the person who had been building it was one of these... one of the engineers, I think, had fallen in love with XML. It had way too much XML bloat. Anyway, Bret got frustrated with this, and over a weekend, rewrote their entire JavaScript for Google Maps. And he made it... if I remember correctly, like a third the size and 10 times as fast. They show up on Monday and he's just completely replaced all of the code. That's the kind of engineer Bret... and the thing is, it isn't bad code. Like, it isn't like sloppy stuff. He'll crank out really high quality code very quickly. So he's... he's like... he's not even a 10x engineer. He's like, 100x, or 1,000x engineer. He's just really good.

A dark-mode social media post claims that Google Maps exists because an extraordinary engineer rewrote its entire codebase over one weekend. The embedded interview excerpt describes Bret replacing slow, bloated JavaScript with code that was one-third the size and ten times faster, escalating the joke from a 10x engineer to a 1,000x engineer. People send this as a humorous reaction to legendary programmer productivity, heroic overachievement, or exaggerated tech-bro engineering stories.

• @gentoomemes / 14596 2024-11-09