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Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

blog.smartbear.com

21–30 of 161 posts

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#21

Fabrice is awesome. I am also extremely impressed with the code written by a guy that goes by the name of Bisqwit. He has multiple videos speed coding here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit

Please tell me that NES emulator video is sped up. His typing speed (and accuracy) alone are phenomenal.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#22

My theory is that Fabrice is not human and most likely a creature not of this world. Seriously, how the hell can someone be so talented and amazing and above all remain such a nice guy? Fabrice is a down to Earth and amazingly talented individual who will go down in history; text books will reference him, heck he'll have a movie one day (maybe not). I don't care if this is an old article, Bellard deserves to be on th…

You mean, like Nicolas Bourbaki?

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#23

My theory is that Fabrice is not human and most likely a creature not of this world. Seriously, how the hell can someone be so talented and amazing and above all remain such a nice guy? Fabrice is a down to Earth and amazingly talented individual who will go down in history; text books will reference him, heck he'll have a movie one day (maybe not). I don't care if this is an old article, Bellard deserves to be on th…

Reading his accomplishment is humbling for any programmer. The fact that he doesn't act like an asshole should serve as an example for the rest of us.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#25
post #6

The question from previous discussion remains unanswered. How does he finance his production of top notch open source software? At least for me, the day to day churn of my day job leaves me too mentally exhausted to chase the crazy ideas I get from time to time, let alone finish them. Imagine a world where hackers, artists and artisans could follow their passions and could chase crazy ideas without a risk of losing t…

I feel exactly the same. I enjoy my work but by the time it gets to the evening I need a break, and I never manage to find the time to hack on fun side projects. I have so many silly ideas and things I want to hack on; I really want to get back into programming just for the hell of it.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#26
post #6

The question from previous discussion remains unanswered. How does he finance his production of top notch open source software? At least for me, the day to day churn of my day job leaves me too mentally exhausted to chase the crazy ideas I get from time to time, let alone finish them. Imagine a world where hackers, artists and artisans could follow their passions and could chase crazy ideas without a risk of losing t…

It's one of the main reasons I decided to become a freelancer. I've been at it for a few months and I can now pull in 5-6k euros for a month long project. This leaves me the option to either work the whole year if I can keep things pipelined and come out with a really nice income, or spend decent chunks of time on my own projects. I'm currently still figuring out the balance between those two. Just had a week off between projects, for example.

The only thing is, I actually work harder on my freelance projects and have less "idle time" than in permanent positions, so I am a bit more tired during projects.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#27

He also authored jslinux[1] in 2011. This guy is amazing and I am truly envious. [1] http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Wow that is really amazing. It actually works. It has wget installed and gcc, tcc a workable vi and screen! You could actually be productive in this enviroment!!!

EDIT: Looks like there is no iface though. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise. I didn't catch that until I tried to wget bash and see how long it would take to compile.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#28

Fabrice is awesome. I am also extremely impressed with the code written by a guy that goes by the name of Bisqwit. He has multiple videos speed coding here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit

Please tell me that NES emulator video is sped up. His typing speed (and accuracy) alone are phenomenal.

Last time these came up, it was said that they take the keystrokes, subtract the backspaces and play back everything else at the pace you see in the video.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#29
Looks like the first link to his personal website in the article is broken:

http://bellard.og

I was going to report it on their main website so I looked for a good way to get in touch with them and found a contact form which seemed to be geared towards sales and had a number of (unrelated to my task) required fields. I'm too lazy to fill out something that is going to get routed to the wrong place and requires me to enter my phone number, position, country, and area of interest on top of my email address and name.

So, I thought I'll just call them.

I called the main phone number and had no way to speak to someone there. The phone prompt simply diverted me to email sales. Heh.

There was a brief period of time where I wondered how a link could remain broken in an otherwise good quality article for over a year. That mystery has been solved.

Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

#30
I too think that Bellard has produced a ton of cool stuff, but bear in mind that the list given on that site spans 20 years of work. You can do a lot in 20 years. That's not to put him down in any way, but if you find yourself comparing your output to his make sure you consider the time span.
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