A Salute to Solo Programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#11

Post by tonyedgecombe » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

scrumper wrote: post #4

This is a nice read. I think that the enormous foundation of frameworks, toolkits, and open source libraries that exist today provide a huge lever for the talented individual - Acorn is an incredibly accomplished app and I had no idea a single person wrote it. Equally, they provide a great crutch for the much greater number of not-very-talented people like me to cobble our ideas together into something approaching a…

I wonder if Core Image is doing a lot of the work for Acorn, I'm not an Apple developer but I remember when it was announced thinking that it would make Photoshop type applications easier to develop.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#12

Post by jorblume » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling.

At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times I ask myself...why is this stupid and what am I going to break?

It definitely has its ups and downs. I think the most valuable lesson has been self reliance. No one is fixing this, it's on me. No one is going to refactor this, except for me.

edit: spelling :(

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#13

Post by troncheadle » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

malux85 wrote: post #8

I am a solo programmer. In London. I rarely see anyone in my day to day. I work from home. I binge work, sometimes for 18-24 hours at a time - I loose track. I love it. I love my life. I have almost finished my latest fun project. I'm collecting 25k data points a second. I control 38 servers. I have automated absolutely everything. i would love to sell it now, but not sure how

What is it? Where is it? Sounds super cool

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#14

Post by snake117 » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

That's not to say that it's impossible to do anything on your own nowadays. I hear that it only took one guy to make Evochron Mercenary (http://www.starwraith.com/evochronmercenary/faq.htm#2) and the game takes roughly 1gb. Now, Star Citizen is supposedly the next big space sim; a big team that has raised over $50 million and creating a game that will probably take over a 100gb to install. Heck it took 20gb just for me to demo the dog-fighting module.

One developer vs a team backed with millions of dollars.

1gb vs 100gb.

It can still happen.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#15

Post by segmondy » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

malux85 wrote: post #8

I am a solo programmer. In London. I rarely see anyone in my day to day. I work from home. I binge work, sometimes for 18-24 hours at a time - I loose track. I love it. I love my life. I have almost finished my latest fun project. I'm collecting 25k data points a second. I control 38 servers. I have automated absolutely everything. i would love to sell it now, but not sure how

how much are you making? ;-)

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#16

Post by skynetv2 » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

Paul's cousin was my colleague a few years ago. He had so many stories to tell about him. He has a personal web site at http://arachnoid.com/

I hear he spends most of his time now sailing.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#17

Post by markbnj » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

I like the attitude and point of view here, and I will also lift a glass to all the solo programmers. As far as I am concerned the actual act of writing code has always been transacted between a single brain and a keyboard. The article does seem to have a slightly dated desktop-oriented perspective, though. Isn't it fair to say that the mobile world reinvigorated the solo/small team development project?

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#18

Post by moron4hire » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #15

malux85 wrote: post #8

I am a solo programmer. In London. I rarely see anyone in my day to day. I work from home. I binge work, sometimes for 18-24 hours at a time - I loose track. I love it. I love my life. I have almost finished my latest fun project. I'm collecting 25k data points a second. I control 38 servers. I have automated absolutely everything. i would love to sell it now, but not sure how

how much are you making? ;-)

It sounds like, "enough".

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#19

Post by westoncb » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

I've been doing the (unpaid) solo thing for years, and I'm almost sure I'm gonna give it up now. I built Tiled Text (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be...) while working at a grocery store and dealing with a repetitive strain injury, and it was a miserable, awful experience. I designed and built this 'abstract visual debugger': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE while my savings slowly ran out, along with my girlfriend's patience for being ignored. And I've spent a ton of time teaching myself mathematics and programming language fundamentals, and writing on new perspectives on programming tools/languages (http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languag...) —with no real prospects for academic recognition (to say nothing of remuneration), with my historically poor academic record.

I think for some people this is the only thing they want to do, and it works out well enough for them. I felt like that was me for a long time, but I've begun to wonder how much of this sort of dedication is motived merely by... baser qualities.

In any case: I salute you, solo programmer! —but be careful, eh? It's possible there's a simpler lifestyle that would make you happier.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#20

Post by morgante » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

> It needs 7.77 gigabytes of disk space. The “obsolete” word processor I use to write this (Pages 2009) weighs in at 388 megabytes; the newer and dumber Pages version 5.5.3 takes up 478 Mbytes.

Binary size is, of course, a poor measure of program complexity. A solo programmer can easily leverage libraries to drive up their total weight significantly.