Keeping up with the Zenters

At Xobni I singlehandedly wrote 30,000 lines in three months.<p>That fucking hurt.<p>But that sunk cost was my #1 motivator during the first year. I remember telling myself that I had to make this work, because if I didn't then I'd have to start all over again.<p>There was a point a long time ago where Xobni was very close to dying. PG said to me "Well if xyz happens then Xobni will be dead."<p>I was hesitant to argue against PG in those days, but I remember saying without hesitation "No, if xyz happens then I'm moving to Texas to live with my parents and eat Ramen noodles for as long as it takes to come back. I will not let this thing die." I couldn't bear the thought of starting over.

Come to think of it, I believe the guys who wrote the most code this past summer were the Anywhere.FMs, who also got bought in the first 6 months. So while I would not want to encourage people to equate LOC with quality, it does seem to be a good sign when founders write a lot of code.

A one liner for recursive line counts (explicitly allowing certain extensions):<p><pre><code> find . -regex ".*\.\(js\|py\|rb\|php\|html\)" | xargs wc -l</code></pre>

55,000 lines of code in the Rock Solid Arcade games so far (4 games, including one bigger unreleased in development). Started work around 3 1/2 months ago. I'd have written them in fewer lines, but I didn't have the time.

If you use Subversion, I suggest svnstat: <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/svnstat" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/svnstat</a><p>We've gone from about 20k to 45k LOC in 2 months.

We're at 38,649 lines of python code according to that script excluding test code, html, css and images since January 1st, 2008.<p>However, this includes white space and comments. So probably 1/2 or 2/3 of that.

I had assumed the Zenters had written their code in Java when I read that.

What a tricky metric.<p>Here's a hypothetical example of what often happens to me:<p>1. Have a problem, need a module, copy a template: 100 LOC.<p>2. Add meat to the bones: 500 LOC.<p>3. Start testing &#38; find gaps: 700 LOC.<p>4. Keep testing until it works (almost) perfectly: 1000 LOC.<p>5. Refactor, rename variables, tighten comments, pull common objects, strip out what was never really needed: 300 LOC.<p>A lot of work to get to 300 LOC, but I couldn't have done it without writing 1000 LOC in the first place. How do I measure that?

<p><pre><code> Code LOC: 1013 Test LOC: 268 Code to Test Ratio: 1:0.3 </code></pre> 3 weeks in. But if I count all the prototypes it's probably closer to 5k lines of code. We probably need to write more code.