Thought this ohloh graph might be interesting: <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/mongodb/analyses/latest" rel="nofollow">http://www.ohloh.net/p/mongodb/analyses/latest</a><p>~30% of the commits on mongodb are Dwight.
Writing code every as a CEO now and again is a nice thing to say but it isn't a scalable approach if you want to maintain that code properly. You can't just expect your C(E|T)O to drop everything that they're doing when an unexpected bug pops up. Great for the morale, but bad for the code.
I'm curious if there's anyone around that codes more than Chris Wanstrath [1] (Github's CEO). He's a beast. And someone we should all look up to.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/defunkt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/defunkt</a>
For a CEO, it's impressive how much in touch he is with MongoDB, its functionality and what it is capable of. You should see him talk, he really knows what he is on about.
Their CTO, Eliot, seems to spend the vast majority of his time coding. I'd say it's the result of a technology-focused company versus, what seems more common these days, as a 'product' company.
I knew a company where the CEO was a coder, wrote much of the original code and sometimes coded.<p>The smallish company had ISO 9000 and an anal change control procedure for Network and System changes. By contrast the programming team had little/no change control or testing.<p>One day the CEO made a change to the code and blew away the customer database (or at least a substantial proportion of the data in it). Everybody just shrugged their shoulders, restored from the overnight backup and wrote off that days data/work.
That does not seem like a plan that will scale well. I think this kind of thing inevitably ends up like the Zuckerberg anecdote, where the CEO eventually has no time to code because being CEO is a full time job, but he still does it to prove he can.