We did it by making it really, really small. No style guidelines. Two space, four spaces, braces in line, braces not in line? Don't care. It doesn't matter. If you're working on some code and you genuinely can't understand it because the layout is a mess, dump it through an auto-layout tool or the like. Honestly, so long as it's readable, arguing over two spaces for an indent or whether the if block first brace should be on the next line or not isn't worth the hassle.

We started with a handful of outright forbidden functions, and some rules on memory management. As time goes on, and various mistakes get made repeatedly, protections against them get added to the standard.

A small standard is better than no standard. A small standard is also better than a big standard.

We had a meeting when the programming team was relatively small. One of us proposed we use the Google standards -- not because he liked them (and he was an ex googler) but simply because they were there and were reasonably comprehensive. He sent the link around before the meeting.

In the meeting we went around and all of us (including the proposer) described something in the google standards that we didn't really like, but in the end could probably live with. For all intents and purposes this was venting, though it wasn't as heated as "venting" usually is.

Then we agreed on the following: - If we used an existing piece of code, we followed its coding standards - For our code we used the Google C++ standard - We had some C# (mono) code so we made a couple of rules for it based on the google standards. - Over time we added a couple of rules specific to us.

> we struggled on agreeing on some coding standard which everyone was happy.

We didn't worry about that. We were happy to have something rather than it be somehow the be all and end all. We chose Google's because it wasn't terrible and of all the standards it was the most likely to already be known by a new hire.

It's the same way we settled on git -- I like it, some hate it, but it does meet our code needs and most people have it on their resume already. Were it doesn't work (e.g. electrical and mechanical CAD, or big binary assets like UI) we don't use it.