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> What's the secret? I am not an Outstanding Programmer, but I like the advice on productivity from Jonathan Blow, paraphrased: "you don't need time management or productivity tips. If you want to complete a project, maximise the time you spend sat on your chair, with the editor open." That's all there is to it. The best way to build a cathedral is one brick at a time. Effort and consistency trumps all. Being a 10x developer has no effect whatsoever on what you can accomplish in work or in life.
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It has got to be more than that. I almost always have an editor open, working on some ambitious project. Without bashing myself too much, I have have 96 original Github projects, 90% of which unfinished. All the finished ones are either tiny, or which such a small niche no one would ever use them or pay attention to them. Of the unfinished ones, they're all so unfinished that even if there would be something worthy of note in there, it would not be in a state that's marketable to anyone. Of course I finished everything I worked on professionally, and there's some cool products amongst those, but no one ever paid me to work on something with global/cultural impact. I'm not complaining at all by the way. I'm always having fun when I'm coding. But there's a definite difference between what I do, and what someone like Ludwig, or mitchellh, or Linus Torvalds, or Bellard, etc is doing. At the very least, there's some focus and speed. I was pretty close to finishing my non standard conforming C compiler, and then Rust came out and it did everything I wanted to do in my C compiler and more. And then a couple years later I was pretty close to finishing my ECS system in Rust, and then my day job became super stressful for a couple months, making me too tired to code at night, and then SPECS was released which basically did what I was trying to do. My favourite OSS project I ever finished was a Ruby framework for writing an AI for the Starcraft: Broodwar game. The amount of active people in the BWAPI community at that point was definitely less than 50. Most of them either did it in Java, or just in C++ directly, I'm pretty sure everyone raised their eyebrows at someone going through the effort of making Ruby bindings.
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To each their own. Committed sitting in a chair works well. But it's not the only option. When my kid was born it completely destroyed the routine of long uninterrupted coding sessions. However it also made me realize that you can prototype and refactor in your head while pushing a stroller. Then you get back to the computer and just flush it all in its final form. The cherry on top is that, end to end, this takes less time than sitting in front of a machine and coding and re-coding. But, again, this worked for me because of how I code. Sitting in chair worked for Blow because of how he codes. So YMMV.
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I agree with the general ethos - good code doesn't get written by attending meetings all day, or fiddling with org mode. But like all advice, it needs caveats. If you're on a brownfield project where you have very little knowledge of the domain or legacy code, just jumping straight in and spending lots of time in your editor is probably going to result in a lot of frustration and wasted effort.
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Googled this guy to look into his background. Time-in-chair is definitely something he's got an edge on over the average person
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Yep, I'm not sure Blow is the person I would take productivity advice from, to put it mildly.
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^ this but it’s very hard to keep that editor open all the time if you’re not “obsessed” with what you are doing.
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What you say is true, but not enough. It is also essential to have a clear idea of what you are trying to build and how you are going to build it. Without those, time in the chair is not going to be used well.
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Agreed. I've showed up nearly every saturday and sunday morning for the past decade, and I'm still working on the same stupid side project because I keep rethinking the fundamentals and going back to the drawing board. I'm finally nearing completion, but looking back, some time management and a clearer vision would have radically improved the outcome of my life thus far.
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I don't completely disagree with that, it's just that the ones who are really familiar with their tools will also iterate on half -baked ideas faster, because there are many things that come come up while on the chair. And this is something that I actually intended to bring this point up in a thread I saw yesterday regarding thinking time and typing time but I procrastinated on it until today. I follow the same principle whenever I type a reply. I'm not gonna pretend that the text I'm currently typing is a draft, but thinking about the things that are worth mentioning is something that I can afford after I started typing a response to your comment, if that makes sense.
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Why not? You just have to use the time in the chair to sketch out a clear idea of how/what you are trying to build first.
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Absolutely correct. At a minimum you need: - the vision of what you want to achieve - the skill to achieve it - the time to build it I find that time is the most difficult problem to solve, especially since I had a family.
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Apply that to a larger scope than writing a program. Your family is something that you're trying to build. Put into that the time needed. If you wind up with not enough time for writing a program, that's fine. In the battle for time between your family and your program, the program should lose. One of my biggest failures was focusing too much on my pet projects when I had small children.
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> Effort and consistency trumps all. Being a 10x developer has no effect whatsoever on what you can accomplish in work or in life. Ehhh. There may be issues with the term 10x developer, but if you're using it then it literally means developers that are more productive than most other developers.
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I know one who is outstanding, not a 10x but a 100x. Here's a short and incomplete list of some of the things he did: Publish games (with an 's') on 16 bit computers when he was a teenagers (and good games at that)
Industrial software to minimize cuts and losses when cutting sheets of metal
Write tools easing the creation of games for smartphone when they came out and put a commercial game in the top 3 of the Apple appstore
Before that : he wrote several apps for Nokia phones (pre Android era) and serve them using a provisioning server he wrote and hosted himself
Write code to port Java code to COBOL for legacy bank infrastructure
Write some sort of Google maps before the days, from aerial pictures he managed to fetch through some people he knew
Created a software company, got funding
Got interested I cryptocurrencies, wrote several wallets, including for smartphones
Wrote an Amiga mod player for the Atari ST (that one was really cool
Find and write detailed reports about JVM bugs
There are many standards he knows by heart
Countless websites
He was doing ML before it LLM broke through: teaching 3D "things" to learn to move
Monitoring and visualization on embedded devices for solar panels/micro inverters efficiency
He moved to devops and loves it. And he still codes. His secret is a life of passion for the trade. There s nothing he s worked on that didn't become faster, cleaner. There s not a single place he s been too where he didn't have things to teach people (and things to learn too: passion and curiosity). He knows so many languages: from assembly to C to C++ to Java to Kotlin to Lua to ML languages to so many scripting languages. Front end, back end, from huge servers to tiny embedded stuff. Dumbphones. Smartphones. The only family of language I know he s never done is Lisp (so I get some creds). He s 50 y/o and he ll kick your sorry ass like you have no idea. He happens to be a very good friend of mine and when I hear that there are no 10x programmers I cannot help but laugh in a condescending manner. He is, unlike me, humble. He ll say he doesn't know much. He s always got a desire to learn. And I think most of all: when he was 30 he thought programmers who were 50 had many things to teach him.
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I'd avoid hero worshiping someone's life given how much of success revolves around being smart enough to be able to take advantage of opportunities, whilst also not suffer from physical, mental or familial setbacks whilst being born into a class/race/gender that promotes you. All the while not being distracted by things such as family goals, drugs/vices or commitments and having time, experience and most critically reputation which can be used to snowball into greater achievements. To take nothing from Ludvig, simply explaining why not everyone can be him.
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Reading through the comments, it seems a significant factor in success is perceived to be the availability of free time. This aligns with my own observations. However, as a father of young children, I wonder if there are examples of life plans that successfully combine family with exciting, successful software projects. I can only think of outstanding programmers who, during the prime of their creative work, were (apparently) free, unattached individuals without (forgive my blunt assumption) significant family ties. Am I mistaken? Are there counterexamples? In my experience, the most relevant skill one develops (and must develop) as a father is discipline and time management. Surely, that has to count for something, right?
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I think it's more-or-less accepted that most extraordinarily accomplished people remained single throughout their lives. Intuitively it makes sense, though it doesn't mean you can't become greatly successful even with family commitments. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least two people who are very successful and prolific, who also have several children.
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Most also look like hobby projects more than professional, so I would imagine having a lot of free time is a prerequisite. I don't know anything about the guy but all of the things you listed are reimplementing something that already existed, which is faster given at least the requirements are very clear.
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Don't build one project. You'll be forever putting it off or finding excuses not to work on it. Build two. Then you can procrastinate on each by working on the other.
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> What's the secret? Probably just time. If we assume that the time frame for all of this was 30 years, this means that he completed one of this projects aprox. every 3 years. This does not look that exceptional to me. The question is, what else he did during this time. In order to assess his work efficiency, we would need to know how many hours he really had to spend on this projects.
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Firstly im not comparing myself to that guy, but you could say i have similar “odds” with starting companies and having them succeed, and I'm a solo developer. Ive build close to 100 projects and companies that have generated over 1B in revenue combined with only one other person (the non-tech owner). I dont have a team, I just build alone on all these. A few notes: I have programmed for over 30,000 hours. 3x what people say the time is to mastery is I look at things in a way that i haven’t really ever heard anyone else explain. I’m not sure if it’s unique but it IS the reason. Everything in my mind is a complex web of cause and effect down to the most nuanced level. In my mind it has a visual aspect even. You have causes (knobs and dials you can turn) to produce effects. Part of meditation is that you can learn an idea more deeply (insight). This same idea sort of applies to what I said above. People miss the magnitude of this cause and effect statement. I’ve told many people and they’re like sure cool. In my mind this statement is like standing next to the tallest mountain. The magnitude and depth is profound. It’s of this magnitude because it means you are in direct control of your own outcomes. Anything you want, is a solvable puzzle. Literally. And the deeper level of insight you feel about this idea the more you are capable of. Now for the actual process of how to navigate this cause and effect. My mind operates on a value formula. Every single decision, word, line of code, micro decision is basically a tradeoff decision. Not in terms of code performance but in terms of this cause and effect web, of EVERY action in physical reality. I have excellent ability to “project” causes outward and then find the “end result”, and essentially find the fastest path from A->B to get there. And this value formula always optimizes RESULTS over other things many other great programmers optimize for like knowledge. I just have a different style. So basically I'm always analyzing every single tradeoff as if I see “threads” of reality extending from every decision and what path I go down. As a simple example I might learn linear algebra and Bayesian statistics extremely intensely for 7 days to learn or build an algorithm, but then I hit a diminishing return where I will switch to something else knowing i can hire someone later to teach me and fill in gaps. This is an extremely simple contrived example. In real life, instead of there being 2 variables there would be like 50.
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Thanks for the insights. It seems to me that this interesting explanation focuses primarily on the tactical level. On a strategic level: What drives you? That is, what criteria do you use to apply the thought process you described above?
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I'm extremely motivated by 2 things: 1) solving puzzles 2) freedom (and by proxy, money) First, when a puzzle gets in my head its extremely extremely difficult not to solve it. I love architecting solutions to complex problems in ways that are simple and elegant. I find it difficult to sleep, eat, or do anything else. Similar to when I was a kid and I realized I might be capable of doing a backflip on a trampoline, the very moment I had the idea that I COULD do it, i got sick to my stomach and laid on the ground wrestling with fear, but it consumed me for hours and hours until I just got on the trampoline and did it. I dont know what that is, but the same thing applies to puzzles, just without the fear. I also have a friendly relationship with money. I absolutely love it, because it gives me freedom. freedom to wake up whenever, focus on whatever, do whatever, travel whatever, learn whatever, help whoever, etc etc. These 2 things added together I think are a good combo for starting technical companies
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Super interesting. How do you approach the marketing and finding the first customers for your businesses?
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Do you do this all in your head, or do you document it anywhere? How much time (or what percentage of the time) do you spend strategizing?
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Ive never really written it online, but I have spent dozens and dozens of hours trying to explain it to people on the phone. I don't spend any conscious time strategizing, as if it's a separate thing. It happens 24/7 on autopilot where I cannot "turn it off". Its more like putting on magic glasses which show you the future, as if you could see colored lines sweeping outward from your decisions... and you move your hand and the path arcs a different way where you can see how a decision affects a future outcome, kind of like a game of hot or cold. It's not actually like that of course, but that's a good analogy. It's something that I cant UNSEE and therefor every action I take has this value formula calculation / cause effect projection "baked in" such that I dont have to "do" anything.
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Are you able to share a concrete example of this process in action to help us 1x plebs understand better?
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A big part of my thirties has been making peace with the reality that I'm not that guy, and trying to balance that with still wanting to excel in the ways I can. I don't have a better answer for you than the ones already posted here, but I am genuinely curious to read the responses to this.
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Better to put it to yourself as - I am like that guy but on my own scale around my own interests. If you can't yield things that half of the world adores, yield smaller ones. If you can't yield smaller ones, yield one liners. You have to have some way of yielding stuff that you fall in love with - even if it's flat directory with one liner scripts. Practice is all there is to it. People have problems with it because they want to bite gigantic pieces in one day. It's more about falling in love with practice than falling in love with end result. ps. pro tip - every time you solved some kind of problem - an issue you've been struggling for longer, a bug or whatever that didn't work - stop, go back in time, imagine yourself replaying it again - ask yourself questions - knowing the answer now, what could have I done/checked/asked/whatever that would have led me to solution faster? What did I miss at the beginning? Which were dead ends that I knew were wrong but I did them anyway etc. - you just need to do it couple of dozen of times to see substantial improvements in your skills.
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Keeping focus is definitely key here. I also program a lot and I also develop open source stuff but develop software without a company/people that drive the features is really hard. When I developed a product for my mother I also had better focus. And having a huge amount of games in my Steam library makes it even more difficult. Not to mention my need to watch lists of multiple steaming services...
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What's your favourite item to steam (with your steaming services, to be clear) ;)
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What makes you say that these are all Stenbergs creations? Could it be that these are just projects that use libcurl in some way? I'm having trouble finding any sources that say that Daniel Stenberg actually worked on spotify, utorrent or openttd directly - just to test three of them.
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> I stumbled upon Ludvig Strigeus while researching Daniel Stenberg I believe the list is for Ludvig.
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Read the post again. These are Ludvig Strigeus's projects.
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Enjoying programming and having the time outside of work. When it's a passion it all becomes a lot easier. The problem is that most developers see programming as their 9 to 5 and outside of that, in little free time they have, they have other pursuits and hobbies. When you see what other programmers achieve who have the time and treat it as an art (Vs work) it's natural for them to have higher productivity.
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"problem" is perhaps not the ideal choice of word here. There's nothing inherently wrong with treating programming as a job and doing something else outside that in your free time, in the same way that we don't all have to be accomplished amateur wood-carvers or poets.
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The quality and depth of Fabrice's output is insane.
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OpenTDD is so great. I played the original when i was a kid. As a 35 yr adult i found OpenTDD and can i just say i love its multiplayer…
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Do what you are passionate about, despite the odds and what other think of your skill level. Your skills will shine throughout all aspects!
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Do what you are passionate about, despite the odds or what other people think about you. People will acknowledge your skill whether they see them or not. Stay hungry, and stay humble!
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not having 996 job not having unpaid oncall forcing you to wake up 3 times on Friday night for years having enough savings and legal residence status to be able to take risks not working for compulsory military substitution without option to quit for years not having your government to kidnap males in broad daylight to be sent to die in trenches at war
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Millions of people are in this situation, most of them not outstanding programmers. But for an anecdote, Fabrice Bellard, one of the best known outstanding programmers (see for yourself here https://bellard.org/ ) is a graduate from Ecole Polytechnique, one of the best (if not the best) engineering school in France. It is a military school, and it starts with 3 weeks of soldier-style training. It is also state sponsored and students are paid, not the other around, and in counterpart, graduates are due for 10 years of work for the state, usually as a high ranking civil servant, though you can "escape" this by paying.
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