There are two questions to which most of us are at some point in the process of growing up very eager to hear the answers of our peers:
* How old were you when you did it for the first time?
* How large is yours?
Engineers aren't any different -- except that for them, the first question refers to signing an NDA and the second to your codebase.
Since I know you are all dying of curiosity, I'm willing to share my answers: I had my first time at the tender age of 18. It was with a very interesting genome research project, and back then their codebase appeared huge to me, mostly because I didn't have any comparison yet. Even though I was a bit anxious at first, it turned out to be a great experience.
The by far largest one I've seen so far is of course that of Google. Even after two years it still feels immense every time I touch it; It's in fact so large that it can be quite a pain in the ass at times.
I've seen and even played with some others, and came to the conclusion that skill matters a lot more than size. Indeed, if something is too big, it really requires a lot of skill to avoid it being painful to deal with. Small size and lack of skill on the other hand always leaves you with the feeling that you'd probably be better off doing it yourself.
And of course, things only start to get really interesting once you are in contact with several at the same time (or watch their more or less deft attempts of uniting with each other).
Okay, enough bawdy jokes for today. Also excuse my complete lack of ability to draw nice stick figures.
-- Birgit
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