guardian/grid
The Guardian’s image management system
GitHub 
65K
lines of main code
811 files
17K
lines of test code
147 files
46K
lines of other code
126 files
13y
age
4,795 days
56%
main code touched
1 year (37K LOC)
ABCDE
ease of change
for people*
ABCDE
ease of change
for AI*
25K
scala
12K
js
11K
java
5K
html
4.7K
css
3.2K
ts
2.7K
tsx
0.7K
yaml
0.06K
py
0.05K
json5
0.05K
xml
EML
0.03K
eml
MJS
0.01K
mjs
30 days 2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013
+22K
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+19K
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+34K
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+59K
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+12K
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+14K
-6.6K
+1K
-524
+35K
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+99K
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+8.4K
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+2K
-505
720

3.1K

1.7K

1.4K

1.3K

1.6K

2.6K

2K

1.4K

1.5K

201

2.7K

8.1K

722

171

121

819

417

407

453

569

836

616

586

566

51

877

3.2K

447

113

0

5

0

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0

0

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0

0

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0

0

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13

25

15

16

23

18

25

17

21

17

7

21

11

6

4

2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013
Rule-of-thumb estimates

Rebuild value

to rebuild
rebuild value

Maintenance effort

per year to maintain
maintenance cost per year
Rules of thumb, not measurements: one man-year rebuilds about 10,000 lines of main code (design, testing and coordination included), and keeping a code base alive takes about 15% of its rebuild value per year (20 man-years of rebuild value need about 3 man-years of maintenance every year). Your changes are remembered in this browser for every report.