Hacker News regularly makes me feel very stupid, and none more so than blog posts by Alyssa Rosenzweig. I couldn't even write an engine that used Vulkan in six months, nor a software rasteriser; meanwhile, Alyssa wrote an entire compliant driver on a non-native operating system running on locked-down hardware in one month flat. What am I doing with my life? EDIT: I point this out because I'd eventually like to write…
Here is the Alyssa timeline:
* She started programming at ~3 with MIT Scratch. Her Father introduced it to her, he works at Intel and is a very successful person.
* I think around age 11-12 she knew C very well, worked on some low level networking stuff for games, she wanted to make an MMO.
* At 12 she made a project to convert LLVM IR to MIT Scratch.
* She was involved with libreboot, not sure to what degree.
* She was 15 when she worked to the open source RPI firmware.
* Interned at FSF
* I think she was ~16 when she developed the Panfrost GPU driver.
I can't help but wonder how my life would be if I was a native English speaker. Lived in USA and had a great father and mentors like hers. I gave everything to programming, everything I have to give. Wonder if I am hitting the limits of my nature or just had worse nurture.