Mar 02 2008
Keeping up with the Zenters
I just got around to reading the Newsweek article on YC. In it Paul is quoted referring to the Zenters “These guys have written 40,000 lines of code in three months!”
The Zenters were just a couple of guys with some work experience similar to Zack and I. But they must have had some serious skill since they were apparently kicking Google’s butt at the Powerpoint game, or at least were offering some pretty novel aspects, because they were acquired just 6 months after they started YC.
Lines of code is far from and end-all indicator of startup success. Especially when ignoring the little things like how much code was re-written/discarded, which languages/frameworks the code is in, comments, spacing between lines, the amazing roundness of the numbers 40,000 and 3 months, etc…. But there seemed to be a high correlation with the Zenters, and its something at least so I decided to see how we stack up.
If your files are all in one directory you can use a simple “cat * | wc -l”. We have a pretty big maze of directories however so I wrote this quick python script to walk the directory structure and find out for me. I wrote it so it’d be relatively easy for others to use. There are two variables at the top of the file where you can include directory names to ignore and characters in files that will exclude them from being counted. This way it won’t count the dirs with code we didn’t write, compiled files, svn repositories, images, copied files that emacs leaves behind, etc.
The results: 20,010 lines of code in the 53 days we’ve been working. Yes, I included the code in this script to break 20,000. Assuming we keep up our pace for the next 38 days (which might be unlikely due to demo day and investors) we’ll be at 34,511 lines for the 3 months. Crap! Just short!
Also, assuming we keep up that pace, I’ll be dead. A fact that Zack is disturbingly unconcerned about.
But kudos to the Zenters. You guys rock.
You can test yourselves to see if you can keep up with the Zenters. Download the script into the root dir of your source files. Open it up and edit the excluded_dirs and exclude_files_containing variables for your needs. Then run it: python line_cnt.py
Why would you spend time writing code for counting lines of code, when there are multiple good options for doing just that and that time could have been spent working on your actual project? And I’d bet those existing tools work better than anything even a great coder could whip up in a few minutes, since they’ve been around for years.
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/
http://cloc.sourceforge.net/
And, keeping up with the Zenters is a worthy aspiration, but I think it’s safe to consider them an outlier. (My company was in the WFP07 alongside the Zenters…and they were an outlier amongst even that group of great coders who were nearly all working harder than at any other time in their lives.)
Everyone needs a break from coding now and then. Some people eat or sleep on their breaks, while we write more code!
This post is hilarious - in a good way. I am one of the Zenters and never thought that much of that stat, and was amazed to see PG post about it. I expected at best to impress a few investors with it. klocs are probably the least important measure of a successful product. However, if you are at just over 20k in 53 days, you are about 18k lines ahead of your counterpart at the closest major corporation in the same amount of time. So, just keep doing what you are doing and you will be able to out develop and iterate any large competitor.