To think that 99% of video on the web today is possible because of FFmpeg is mind blowing.
How so?
Pretty much any video site your can think of (Youtube, Vimeo, DailyMotion...) is possible via FFmpeg (which re-encodes the videos).
Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
91–100 of 161 posts
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some might see this as a bit negative - I take that in a positive way - I have maybe another 20 years of brain power left. Since the last 20 years were not nearly as productive as Bellard's I shall endeavour to calm down, and make the next 20 count.
I have to ask, what is your age that you think you only have 20 years of brain power left? For sure, there are ages for which this is true, but given the age distribution of HN readers, seeing this post makes me curious. Perhaps the plasticity of our brains is reduced, but that alone doesn't mean you have no brain power. If you think of learning as "leveling up", you may stop increasing in level at some point, but yo…
Many famous composers and writers produced their finest works in their later years. Surely we can do the same!
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#93> 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.
Yeah, me too... TI-51 III (aka TI-55 in US) in the late 70s - belonging to my father, who had it for his job but never got to use it much because I was always playing with it. He later got me a copy of this book - http://books.google.ca/books?id=ySZhMJrzhw4C&pg=PT48&... - and that's really where my computing career began.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#94> 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.
TI 57 here. Then went on with the HP-28 and HP-48. Wrote the first game using hardware scroll on the HP-48 (a Pacman). Interesting that beyond the TI calculator, there are a few other parallels with Bellard: I studied in one of the top French engineering school (Mines de Paris), wrote a 3D program as a student (Alpha Waves, Guiness book for first 3D platformer), an open-source compiler (XL, http://xlr.sf.net ), a mac…
Hey, I recognized Alpha Waves! But I have to agree that the open approach seems to be a better career move...and maybe increasingly so these days since there are so many programmers around that if you don't open something, someone else will immediately start cloning it.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#95My 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…
I always find that the most talented people are relatively pretty down to earth given their accomplishments, while the higher the mediocrity to the position the more arrogant a person is, like a middle manager who only got the job because his in-law sits at the board.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#96The 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'm essentially doing it. It's hard. You have to quit your job and organize income. For me it's a combination of open source donations and consulting with living in a relatively low income (and low cost) country, so consulting can pay for a lot more, if you do it on a global scale.
Where do you live?
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#97For the sake of discussion, I'm going to throw some fuel on the "should you go to college?" fire. One of the things that's evident in Bellard's achievements is that he has a tremendous depth of domain specific knowledge, especially in signal processing. This is unsurprising, because he studied at Ecole Polytechnique, France's premier engineering school, specializing in telecommunications. See page 4-6 of this PDF: ht…
No meaningful disussion can come from this. Other students went to the same school I'm sure. Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The question whether you should get university education is not an easy one. I'm strugling with it all the time and I am going to an university.
He went to a institution known for its math, we do see the same kind of results from his peers - just not in computer science.
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#98Agreed.
Other programmers who seem super-productive to me include Julian Seward (bzip2 and valgrind), Larry Wall (patch, rn, and perl), Ken Thompson (Unix and substantial parts of Plan9 and Golang), Aaron Swartz (web.py, Open Library, Demand Progress), Steve Wozniak before his accident (Apple I, Apple II, Integer BASIC, a hardware video game, SWEET-16), of course Bill Gates (BASIC-80 and various other early Microsoft products), Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, Oberon), and maybe Darius Bacon, although none of his free-software projects are widely used.
None of them approach Bellard's level.
I think Bellard has another important thing going for him, beyond discipline and followup: he tackles important and difficult problems, things that are barely within anybody's reach. He's mostly not working on another text editor, another online chat system, or another casual game.
Who are your candidates?
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#99Awesome 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 someti…
Reminds me of http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le...
> "Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"
Re: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one person calls you a jackass, ignore him. If two people call you a jackass, think about it. If three people call you a jackass, buy yourself a saddle.
I like this proverb, but I think maybe it should be updated to 1% of people who know you, 2%, 3% or some such. I mean, if thousands of people know you, 3 thinking you are a jackass isn't bad.
Ah, but it's 3 telling you.