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For me, the most eye-opening codebase of my career was Cocotron, around 2007:

https://github.com/cjwl/cocotron

I was looking for a way to port my native Mac Cocoa apps to Windows. I had been already disappointed by the aimless sprawl of GNUstep.

This one-person project implemented all the essential APIs for both Foundation and AppKit. Reading the code was a revelation: can it really be this simple and at the same time this effortlessly modular for cross-platform support?

I contributed a few missing classes, and successfully used Cocotron for some complex custom GUI apps that needed the dual-platform support.

Cocotron showed me that one person with a vision can build something that will rival or even outgun large teams at the big tech companies. But focus is essential. Architecture astronauts usually never get down from their high orbits to ship something.



+1 to this.

I remember my boss asking me to build a MacOS UI we had on Windows with this. I was very sceptical that it would go anywhere.

But no, it worked. I was just open mouth shocked to see the GUI worked pretty flawlessly in Windows.


:)


Thank you!




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