To think that 99% of video on the web today is possible because of FFmpeg is mind blowing.
Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
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Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#42I downloaded his pi computer from http://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/tpi.html and I don't see the source code for the "tpi" program there. Is that source code available anywhere?
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#43Awesome article.
I like the bulleted conclusions at the end, but this nugget in the middle is my favorite:
"While he moves every few years into new and fertile unconquered territory, he exercises patterns that have served him well over and over: cleanly-styled C, data compression, numerical methods, signal processing, pertinent abstractions, media formats, open-source licensing, and “by-hand parsing.”"
I think sometimes for me I tend to wander from one technology and field to the next, but there's definitely something to be said for focusing a bit more on certain languages/technologies and what you're interested in.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#44My 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?
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Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#45Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#46My 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?
Are you really suggesting Bellard is the collective pseudonym of a group of people and not a single person?
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#47The 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…
But if the problems you're solving are truly great, then they would be worth enough money to fund your development effort.
There is a flaw in your rationale. Creative endeavours are a high risk activity. Heck, just see how big % of startups fail. Also, we do not know how many failed projects Bellard has started (I'd suspect hundreds?).
Us mere mortars have bills to play and children to support. It makes us unable to take on the challenges that could potentially lead to huge gains because the short term rewards are not guaranteed.
Also measuring every step of progress with monetary value does not work. New discovery (or project, or tool, whatever) may be the first step required on a long path to a great discovery, but by itself, worth €/$ 0 to everybody.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Everyone is an asshole in someone's mind. You'll never please all people, and when you don't, they'll think you're an asshole. That's life. Don't let what they think bother you.
Replace asshole by douche and you'll get a more accurate version of what I meant.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#49> Bellard, born in 1972, began practicing his own coding techniques first on a TI-59 scientific calculator, at the beginning of the ‘80s.
I wonder how many people have started their programming experience on a TI calculator. I had the same way in with a TI-85.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#50He 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.
Bear in mind there's no network because the environment it is running it doesn't have a network available to it. Especially at the time that came out, all you could count on was XMLHTTPRequest, and that would require some sort of server proxy, etc. etc., not really the point. I'm sure that if a network was reasonably available, jsLinux would have it.