I think Bigwig has become my favourite bit of code that I’ve ever worked on.

Before Bigwig, it was Object Factory, before that it was a Delphi class that I used to create tree-structured data (imaginatively called TNode).

Bigwig’s doesn’t have a test suite and it’s not even my code – it was started by David Smalley and has contributions from Caius Durling and the rest of the Brightbox team.

But there’s just something about it – it’s a daemon (start it running and forget about it); it’s been running in production for months without a single glitch; and probably most importantly, the code is so simple that there’s almost nothing to it.