Working on Chrome made me develop a tool for reading source code
As someone looking in from outside, the Chrome codebase is a treat. Anecdote.<p>Once during the start of my career I was asked to implement a caching layer in an HTTP library. I had no idea what it was, so there was some reading up to do. There were the excellent guides from mnot.net, as well as the nicely written RFC 2616. But Chrome's code was the best of all - <a href="https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/http/http_response_headers.cc#L990" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/http/http_...</a>. If you want to know for a fact how Chrome decides caching, that code is kind of the heart of it.<p>Recently I needed to retrieve the "Rendered Font Name" that is available in the DevTools "Computed CSS" section. This is the name of the system font that Chrome finally picks, based on the Font-Family property. This is platform specific and so not in DOM, nor available to Chrome Extensions directly. The only way it could be done was by making an extension running in debug mode and communicates to the browser thru its remote debugger protocol. (This part of the documentation is lacking, but it is an esoteric topic anyway). The good news was that the code that does this is well encapsulated and could be easily extracted into a command line utility. For the curious: <a href="https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/third_party/WebKit/Source/platform/fonts/mac/FontFamilyMatcherMac.mm#129" rel="nofollow">https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/thir...</a> (there is a nugget about real-world software in the comments)<p>This is, at a surface level, good code to me. Things are easy to find, there is a rhyme and rhythm to the system, and feels  welcoming. The thoughts of the people who designed that system over years would be great to hear. 
Most writing about good code on the internet comes from an OO background, mostly wrt information systems. I wonder what people who've written these systems have to say about building and engineering complex software.