The anecdote about rob pike and logging made me chuckle.
Fun fact about Google: logging is like 95% of the job, easily... From tracking everything every service is doing all the time to wrangling the incoming raw crawl data, it's all going through some kind of logging infrastructure.
I was there when they actually ran themselves out of integers; one of their core pieces of logging infrastructure used a protocol buffer to track datatypes of logged information. Since each field in a protocol buffer message is tagged with an integer key, they hit the problem when their top-level message bumped up against the (if memory serves) int16 implementation limit on maximum tag ID and had to scramble to fix it.