It's quite inspiring how small tech startups quickly grow into unicorn companies, while the media glamourizes the process of becoming a unicorn, those familiar with tech understand that it's harder than it looks, the process of coming up with the idea may be easy, however, the implementation of these products using code is one that at times defies human logic and reasoning.
WHAT'S SO SPECIAL ABOUT CODE?
When we talk about code, most people don't appreciate how much effort goes into it, software engineering is one of the feats of human achievement. The ability to work together to create immaterial resources that have so much impact on the material world is beyond astounding. That said, I understand that we as humans like to quantify things in a bid to properly evaluate them.
HOW LARGE CAN SOURCE CODE GET?
Today we will be going over the estimated lines of code that some of our most popular digital infrastructures are running on, do bear in mind that there is a margin for error as the information wasn't gotten from the owners of the digital infrastructure. Be that as it may, it's safe to say to assume that the reports I got are +/-10% accurate. Let's dig in shall we?
SHOW ME THE NUMBERS
Facebook runs on over 100 Million (100,000,000) lines of code (published by wired in 2019). Google runs on over 2 Billion (2,000,000,000) lines of code (published by wired in 2015). The Android operating system runs on 12 to 15 million lines of code (published by visual capitalist in 2017). Google Chrome (browser) runs on 6.7 million lines of code (estimated by visual capitalist ).
By now you start to understand the sheer size of some of our most used digital resources and the amount of innovation and effort that goes into managing and adding new features to these products. Project management, product documentation and a fantastic team of software engineers, DevOps engineers among others are a must when building products like these.