Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,
Does that mean that a less competent developper could write a more intuitive alternative in a few months ?
Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
161–170 of 375 posts
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#162Anki, the very popular Spaced Repetition System is developped and maintained by one person if I'm correct.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?
It was amazing that within ~24hrs of Linus releasing `.git` there were corresponding implementations of the backing data store within ~1 week for all the other "major" competing version control systems (eg: hg, svn, darcs) and written in just about every possible language. The core of git is brutally simple and efficient, and maps incredibly well to "a linked list (and hash) of files serialized to disk". Someone wrot…
But, he didn't.
Linus copied the design from Monotone, by Grayson Hoare (who also made the original pre-pre-1.0 Rust).
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lucas Pope is for sure a solo dev. He wrote a custom shader for Obra Dinn while he was also writing the storyline. It's a pretty incredible feat.
A custom shader is an incredible feat?
Well, no, but arguably that one was: https://danielilett.com/2020-02-26-tut3-9-obra-dithering/
(But yes it's a bit weird not to say that the feat was, uh, making that whole game).
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#165TeX
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#166Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,
After years of using other architectures and thinking really hard about what worked and what didn't.
And Notch would obsessively play Dwarf Fortress before writing any code for Minecraft. The distinction between influence and contribution is a fine line.
It's worth studying so aspirants understand no achievement exists in a vacuum, but not a means to divide something between solo and collaboration.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#167SSH - originally written by one person - Tatu Ylönen.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#168The "Cat's Eye" reflector used on roads was invented by Percy Shaw [1]
in the 1930s. It's arguably saved miliions of lives and is found all
around the world. It is a design that's simple, passive, robust, cheap
and very effective, making it one of the all-time great inventions
[1] Richard Hollins Murray contributed to the idea
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#169I'd say literature come to mind the most. A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics
This is such a fascinating observation to me. Why has literature largely resisted team based creation? Writing teams exist for other mediums, but literature is almost exclusively written by a single creator who then loops others in after the work is completed.
A counterexample is The Expanse series [1]. Its author is listed as "James S. A. Corey", but that's actually a "pen name" for two people who work collaboratively [2]. But as you say, such examples are the exception.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#170The lines blur between creation/discovery for some of these. Additionally, the historic nature makes it impossible to determine if these were all the work of a single individual, but I'll go with: Joseph Shivers - Lycra/Spandex Albert Hoffman - LSD Anton Köllisch - MDMA (was killed in WW1) John Pemberton - Coca Cola (significantly different to the modern drink) John Baird Glen - Propofol Percy Spencer - Microwave Ove…
This is an interesting list because it gestures toward the fact that basically any first synthesis of a compound not found in nature appears to meet the poster's criterion.
It's vanishingly uncommon for a first synthesis to have been undertaken by a true team, although this can get murky recently with drug discovery software narrowing search space. Nevertheless there is always a moment when (barring alien civilization) the compound never existed, then it does: it is nearly always one person doing the chemistry, with (at most) assistants who are fully supervised extensions of his or her will.
Aspirin, for only one example, is the creation of Charles Frédéric Gerhardt.