People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled “all modern digital infrastructure” and it stands on one small block, “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”.
We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.
11 of 23 projects had one or two people doing the regular work.
Wow.
Behdad Esfahbod rewrote HarfBuzz, which decides how letters join and sit for Android, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, the Kindle and Figma.
हिन्दी with HarfBuzz
ह ि न ् द ी the same letters, unshaped
مرحبا with HarfBuzz
م ر ح ب ا the same letters, unshaped
For English the job is mostly simple. In Hindi, Arabic, Tamil and most of the world’s writing, letters change shape depending on their neighbours, and without shaping a word comes out as a row of pieces. Behdad started the rewrite around 2012 while he was at Google. This year he wrote 85 percent of the changes, with five other people doing regular work.
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