The best technical standard ever created came from one of the worst codebases in Unix history.

Syslog. Written by Eric Allman in the early 1980s as part of Sendmail. If you’ve ever been exposed to sendmail.cf and M4 configuration, that name should strike fear into your heart. But Allman got one thing exactly right: he made Syslog simple. So simple it became the de facto standard across Unix-like systems and network equipment for 45 years. RFC 3164 didn’t formalize it until nearly 2003. RFC 5424 wasn’t ratified until 2009.