For quite a while now, I’ve been lurking on blink-dev, the mailing list on which the development of Blink takes place.
There are many good things to be said about the project itself and its development process. The forum has seen its share of heated and very interesting discussions, from the deprecation of SHA-1 certificates –where the position of the CAs essentially boils down to “work is hard”– to that of the showModalDialog API. The list is generally exemplary of a well-managed, large open-source project.
Just today, this post was published and I personally find it mind-blowing, regardless of the interest you may have in the subject in question. The email is succinct, documented, tells a story and just drives the point home. It’s truly rare to see technical people lacking enough in ego that they’re publicly announcing not that they failed, but that incorporating their work would not be in the best interest of the project. They had an idea, spent months working on it, ran precise, repeatable and favorable benchmarks, and then decided to just scrap their work.
A stellar example of engineering.