After watching Minecraft: The Story of Mojang [1] I was left with the impression that no one at Mojang really knows how to run a business, but since the cash from Minecraft just keeps coming in, everybody at Mojang is just having a great time.
In this sense they a very much a like a startup learning to become a company, but without the financial pressure.
It will be interesting to see if Minecraft will be a one-hit wonder for Mojang or if they will be able to grow into a company with sustainable profits from multiple IPs.
I've used JUCE professionally for almost 2 years now and I find the introjucer to be a very poor substitute for CMake.
It is all GUI based and hardwired to a single XML file with predefined settings, so there just is not a lot of flexibility for setting up more complex projects nor sharing settings across projects.
Even the things that introjucer does support, it does not always do well, like icon support or keeping up with the latest iOS changes to Xcode for instance.
The general problem with JUCE is that is just a too ambitious project for one man and feels like a "well executed hobby" library instead of a "professional production" library. There are a lot of inconsistencies and bugs that you quickly run into when you dig deep enough into the library.
Issues are fixed and introduced on a daily basis, you have to be very careful when updating the latest "release" (which seem quite random) as your existing code could break.
That being said, I think the price for a commercial license of JUCE is a steal if you are working with C++ audio/DSP programming and it will save you a lot of time up front.
You just have to keep in mind that you will probably need to invest time in patching/extending JUCE due to the fact that only one guy is maintaining it and he only has so much time to work on it every day.
There was a thread on Reddit a while back were a few users said that Nvidia are not that great at documenting their hardware internally.
"Nope. One of the reasons is that NVIDIA still doesn't document anything. A friend of mine worked there, and he told me that most of the knowledge was gathered by having little gatherings with the "village elders" as they were called. Seriously. He even leaked a humorous internal video to me called "Zero Documentation" in the style of Zero Punctuation."
From a description on the author's website[1] of a Doom clone written in 13k of JavaScript.
> Until recently all content on this website was research, and while writing papers can be fun, sometimes you just need to blow off a little steam.
I think more companies should allow for their employees to have some plain old fun with no strings attached on a regular basis.
[1] https://nicholas.carlini.com/