But then I was thinking the guy probably isn’t running on foot with four tires

He just has to think outside the box.

They forgot Rule One.

If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

I’ve seen code with binary data (such as icons) baked into constants. I can’t wait for the three hour narration of base64 encoded pngs.