10 ms·

A Salute to Solo Programmers

245 points by chmars 11y ago

curiousjorge 11y ago
this sounds like me
zer00eyz 11y ago
There are quite a few of these guys still out there. Look at dwarf fortress great example of one guy "doing it on his own"
- frou_dh 11y ago
  Just the other day... Terry Davis showing a game using his own graphics libraries, compiled with his own compiler, running on his own OS: https://youtu.be/EsFPq6I13vA?t=300 https://youtu.be/EsFPq6I13vA?t=300 Though I suppose the article has a commercial/organisational slant.
  - gorena 11y ago
    Well, that guy's kind of a huge racist, so an ode to him is probably in poor taste: https://twitter.com/TempleOS/status/337551685285195777 https://twitter.com/TempleOS/status/337551685285195777
    - mildbow 11y ago
      I didn't take the time to delve in to other tweets, but if you know more about him, can you tell me whether, based on what you know of him, he is saying "black people are niggers"(0) or "I won't be shamed into not using a word"(1). Based on just the tweet, it sounds like #1. If so, I can only repeat "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". And, furthermore, I don't think that, in itself, says he's racist.
      - jeffreyrogers 11y ago
        He often makes those kind of comments. But he's schizophrenic, so it's probably not entirely his own fault.
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        No, it's the first one. He's a pretty big bigot and racist. He's also been diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia, so take that for what it's worth.
- yAak 11y ago
  Dwarf Fortress is definitely one of those cases. I was (kind of) surprised it didn't make the list. Beyond it being an ongoing epic masterpiece of a single man (with contributions from his brother), what's particularly amazing about Dwarf Fortress is how much it has inspired and influenced OTHER games being produced, despite being an extremely niche, unforgiving, and unapologetic game.
scrumper 11y ago
This is a nice read. I think that the enormous foundation of frameworks, toolkits, and open source libraries that exist today provide a huge lever for the talented individual - Acorn is an incredibly accomplished app and I had no idea a single person wrote it. Equally, they provide a great crutch for the much greater number of not-very-talented people like me to cobble our ideas together into something approaching a polished product. That's new: I certainly couldn't have hoped to get much done writing 6502 assembler, but with a Cocoa book and a few late nights I'm earning actual money from code I wrote.
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  I wonder if Core Image is doing a lot of the work for Acorn, I'm not an Apple developer but I remember when it was announced thinking that it would make Photoshop type applications easier to develop.
gjolund 11y ago
Credit where credit is due -> https://github.com/sindresorhus https://github.com/sindresorhus
- AndyKelley 11y ago
  This guy has me blocked on GitHub and I have no idea why. I've never interacted with him before. I tried to make a simple pull request to fix something and GitHub won't even let me fork his code. I've emailed him and asked if he perhaps blocked me by accident or something and got no response.
CmonDev 11y ago
> Today, such singular achievements appear to be no longer possible. More people than ever are making their own things today.
yAak 11y ago
I didn't realize Acorn was a solo act. I ignored since I bought Pixelmator first, but now I have to go buy Acorn to support the guy just out of respect.
malux85 11y ago
I am a solo programmer. In London. I rarely see anyone in my day to day. I work from home. I binge work, sometimes for 18-24 hours at a time - I loose track. I love it. I love my life. I have almost finished my latest fun project. I'm collecting 25k data points a second. I control 38 servers. I have automated absolutely everything. i would love to sell it now, but not sure how
- troncheadle 11y ago
  What is it? Where is it? Sounds super cool
- segmondy 11y ago
  how much are you making? ;-)
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    It sounds like, "enough".
jorblume 11y ago
I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling. At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times I ask myself...why is this stupid and what am I going to break? It definitely has its ups and downs. I think the most valuable lesson has been self reliance. No one is fixing this, it's on me. No one is going to refactor this, except for me. edit: spelling :(
- zer00eyz 11y ago
  I would have to say your in a much different place than these guys were. The internet, open source (the amount of it at least), the FOTM chat client... If you want to talk shop you are more than welcome to contribute to one of the open source projects out there (I'm sure you have a few in the stack). I will say it isn't the same as having a partner in crime at work, but you can get your self exposed to new ideas and thinking if you so choose!
  - jorblume 11y ago
    Oh totally, it's a completely different world. I mean look at Stackoverflow. Literally one google search can solve even the more complex problems a programmer might encounter. Like you said, github, meetups, skype...just reading through source code on github helps me immensely.
- ProAm 11y ago
  > At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. I'm in the same position, it's really lonely being the only technical resource. Just someone to bounce ideas off of. On the other side, everything works and when it doesn't I know exactly why within moments because I wrote it all.
  - babuskov 11y ago
    I had this problem for years. And then I picked an open source project that uses the same language and tools and started contributing to it. I made some great friends and the mailing list was always live with discussion that was often much broader than the thing we were building. Over the years we also met live on a couple of conferences, had drings/dinners together and it really helped me fill the void of working alone on commercial side.
snake117 11y ago
That's not to say that it's impossible to do anything on your own nowadays. I hear that it only took one guy to make Evochron Mercenary (http://www.starwraith.com/evochronmercenary/faq.htm#2 http://www.starwraith.com/evochronmercenary/faq.htm#2) and the game takes roughly 1gb. Now, Star Citizen is supposedly the next big space sim; a big team that has raised over $50 million and creating a game that will probably take over a 100gb to install. Heck it took 20gb just for me to demo the dog-fighting module. One developer vs a team backed with millions of dollars. 1gb vs 100gb. It can still happen.
skynetv2 11y ago
Paul's cousin was my colleague a few years ago. He had so many stories to tell about him. He has a personal web site at http://arachnoid.com/ http://arachnoid.com/ I hear he spends most of his time now sailing.
markbnj 11y ago
I like the attitude and point of view here, and I will also lift a glass to all the solo programmers. As far as I am concerned the actual act of writing code has always been transacted between a single brain and a keyboard. The article does seem to have a slightly dated desktop-oriented perspective, though. Isn't it fair to say that the mobile world reinvigorated the solo/small team development project?
westoncb 11y ago
I've been doing the (unpaid) solo thing for years, and I'm almost sure I'm gonna give it up now. I built Tiled Text (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be&t=1m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be...) while working at a grocery store and dealing with a repetitive strain injury, and it was a miserable, awful experience. I designed and built this 'abstract visual debugger': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE while my savings slowly ran out, along with my girlfriend's patience for being ignored. And I've spent a ton of time teaching myself mathematics and programming language fundamentals, and writing on new perspectives on programming tools/languages (http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languages-dont-have.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languag...) —with no real prospects for academic recognition (to say nothing of remuneration), with my historically poor academic record. I think for some people this is the only thing they want to do, and it works out well enough for them. I felt like that was me for a long time, but I've begun to wonder how much of this sort of dedication is motived merely by... baser qualities. In any case: I salute you, solo programmer! —but be careful, eh? It's possible there's a simpler lifestyle that would make you happier.
- ioeu 11y ago
  Your abstract visual debugger is really cool! I was thinking about pursuing something similar for my bachelor thesis but ended up doing something much different. I'm curious to learn more about your insights regarding the subject, where can I find more information? Also curious to learn what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why? Edit: Going through your submissions now (:
  - westoncb 11y ago
    Unfortunately I haven't really written on the ideas behind it, though I probably will soon. A couple people asked me to submit it to the 'Future Programming Workshop,' so I was thinking of putting together some kind of writeup—but I had no money to attend. The main idea was to display a running program's state at the same level of abstraction at which programmers think about their programs. I often found myself writing 'one off' visualizations of data structures for complex pieces of code; this was an attempt at a general solution: it would be able to render all of the different (visual) classes of data structures—the programmer would just need to say which of their data structures should be 'monitored.'
morgante 11y ago
> It needs 7.77 gigabytes of disk space. The “obsolete” word processor I use to write this (Pages 2009) weighs in at 388 megabytes; the newer and dumber Pages version 5.5.3 takes up 478 Mbytes. Binary size is, of course, a poor measure of program complexity. A solo programmer can easily leverage libraries to drive up their total weight significantly.
dagw 11y ago
The game Banished (http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/ http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/) is another modern example of an amazing piece of software turned out by a single programmer.
- foldor 11y ago
  While we're looking at amazing gaming accomplishments my solo programmers, there's also Axiom Verge (http://www.axiomverge.com/ http://www.axiomverge.com/) which was released on PS4/PC this year.
  - genericacct 11y ago
    Interesting coincidence: both are games. In the business world when you buy an app you probably want to make sure that someone will be able to maintain it even if something happens to the project lead.
eloff 11y ago
AFAIK LuaJIT was the work of Solo programmer Mike Pall. He built it on top of Lua, of course, but it's still an incredible feat of engineering and dedication. There are some who speculate that Mike Pall is possibly an alias for a whole team of people, but I think the reality is it's just one hard-working and extremely talented individual. He's now in the process of passing on the torch to the community, after a decade of shepherding LuaJIT.
mgrennan 11y ago
Here is another. He writes in assembler. Steve Gibson GRC.com.
DrNuke 11y ago
Most grunt work is automated and so much knowledge is leveraged even solo-shops can keep all tech together. Good! That said, data from hard-science problems is the new nut to crack. I almost cry thinking of startups like rescale.com, the chance they offer to independent researchers and scientists to do so much more than it can be done in a shared lab or cluster. When I read of $$$ burn rate in the SV, I cringe: one ikea table quoted at $250 is one good full day of work with rescale.com. Unbelievable, make me think VCs and investors should ask for much more value for money when funding science startups.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Is rescale's offering the equivalent of an Ikea table? I'm not sure of the relevance of the connection.
  - kctess5 11y ago
    I think this person might be a bot, most of his comments are borderline non-sensical.
  - DrNuke 11y ago
    It may be bootstrapping attitude but instead of a $250 table I would do with a $100 table + $150 on rescale!
perlpimp 11y ago
"The many superpowers of Apple’s Preview (here and here) does justice to the app’s power and flexibility. Read it and join me in my appreciation for this labor of love from a solo, unnamed programmer who, I’m told, has been at it since the NeXT days." Preview is one app that is a source of constant admiration and consistency that makes using OS x that much easier. Maybe a single excellent developer can make better call in terms of consistency because applying similar pattern across board is natural where doing so for more than one person requires a whole lot more effort? (communication, keeping up with a style etc.) While on the same subject can there be some way to make reusable components for visual intefaces ala unix commanline and pipes. If so then developers can do well developing bits of code, each doing one thing well and let users construct their own "solutions"
- ant6n 11y ago
  Preview is ok. It's clunky for looking at multiple images in a directory. Editing images is just weird - saving the image as you make edits, so you have to revert if you play with something - it breaks a 40 year old opn file-edit file-save file paradigm.
thoman23 11y ago
Hmm, I think it's easier than ever for the solo programmer. Production deployment is easier, research and knowledge sharing is easier, testing is easier, finding a third party library to help is easier...everything is easier. A good programmer can build a product from beginning to end very easily now.
9999 11y ago
Eric Chahi's work on Another World immediately came to mind as a great solo achievement while reading this. This code review written a few years ago is very good: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/ http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/
codeshaman 11y ago
It's an interesting period. On one hand, even though the complexity of the app has grown a lot, so have the tools and libraries which are available. Another important aspect of doing it alone is the ability to market your software. If you're not interested in that too much and don't have a spouse or friend who can take care of promoting, selling, customer support, etc, then it's difficult to make a living with it. And of course, the competition is fierce and getting stronger every day. Kids are growing up with computers and devices and they write code. I've just spent 30 minutes playing a 10-year old's game (John Carmak's son, btw :) ). Then there's always the 'open source' way - you start solo and then people join you. My life as a solo programmer has been in ups and downs - making money while working full time as a programmer and then going solo and spending all my savings on experimental projects which so far haven't been commercially successful. Now I have to take a job again and be a 'team player'...
drawkbox 11y ago
Most programming languages were started by solo/independent developers, and some worked many years before anyone else helped. When you look for innovation, somewhere along the line it was an individual or solo dev work of creativity. Great teams are made up of self propelling independent/solo capable developers that can work in a team or parallel on separate products or services in a project. Guido worked on Python for many years before anyone joined in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R52mi-Fyk0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R52mi-Fyk0E
inostia 11y ago
I am a solo dev at a university and a couple advantages I enjoy is that I choose my own technologies, and I am learning all about other aspects of web dev including sys/server admin. I can legitimately say that I am a full-stack engineer, albeit because I was semi forced to learn everything...
heraclez 11y ago
"make a dent" funny how OP nods to steve today when he snitched him to sculley back in the day
boundlessdreamz 11y ago
Fabrice Bellard is the greatest solo programmer IMO. He wrote FFMPEG, QEMU, A PC emulator in Javascript and a ton of other stuff - http://bellard.org/ http://bellard.org/
- segmondy 11y ago
  The greatest that you know of.
  - boundlessdreamz 11y ago
    Yes, of course :)
njx 11y ago
I have been doing solo development of http://bit.ly/1MPBDze http://bit.ly/1MPBDze for so many years, now just business development and occasional coding
pandatigox 11y ago
I think the conclusion really resonates to the Handmade Manifesto that was posted a few days back.
eigenbom 11y ago
Hi to all the other solo devs out there! I've been building http://moonman.io/ http://moonman.io/ mostly by myself for 4 years now, writing all the code (roughly 100k lines of c++) as well as creating all the earlier art and design. Earlier this year I was lucky to be crowdfunded enough to hire an artist and continue working on the game. On projects that span years you find that you're not actually working alone, you're collaborating with your younger self. A younger self who is more naive, more optimistic, sloppier, and who leaves funny comments for you to stumble across years later.
AndyKelley 11y ago
Solo programmer reporting in. I've been working on libsoundio[1], an alternative to PortAudio. This is in the context of Genesis[2], a digital audio workstation. Collaboration is great but sometimes if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. [1]: http://libsound.io/ http://libsound.io/ [2]: http://genesisdaw.org/ http://genesisdaw.org/
meir_yanovich 11y ago
Notch started as totally solo developer for MineCraft.

245 points by chmars 11y ago

this sounds like me

There are quite a few of these guys still out there. Look at dwarf fortress great example of one guy "doing it on his own"

frou_dh 11y ago
Just the other day... Terry Davis showing a game using his own graphics libraries, compiled with his own compiler, running on his own OS: https://youtu.be/EsFPq6I13vA?t=300 https://youtu.be/EsFPq6I13vA?t=300 Though I suppose the article has a commercial/organisational slant.
- gorena 11y ago
  Well, that guy's kind of a huge racist, so an ode to him is probably in poor taste: https://twitter.com/TempleOS/status/337551685285195777 https://twitter.com/TempleOS/status/337551685285195777
  - mildbow 11y ago
    I didn't take the time to delve in to other tweets, but if you know more about him, can you tell me whether, based on what you know of him, he is saying "black people are niggers"(0) or "I won't be shamed into not using a word"(1). Based on just the tweet, it sounds like #1. If so, I can only repeat "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". And, furthermore, I don't think that, in itself, says he's racist.
    - jeffreyrogers 11y ago
      He often makes those kind of comments. But he's schizophrenic, so it's probably not entirely his own fault.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      No, it's the first one. He's a pretty big bigot and racist. He's also been diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia, so take that for what it's worth.
yAak 11y ago
Dwarf Fortress is definitely one of those cases. I was (kind of) surprised it didn't make the list. Beyond it being an ongoing epic masterpiece of a single man (with contributions from his brother), what's particularly amazing about Dwarf Fortress is how much it has inspired and influenced OTHER games being produced, despite being an extremely niche, unforgiving, and unapologetic game.

scrumper 11y ago

This is a nice read. I think that the enormous foundation of frameworks, toolkits, and open source libraries that exist today provide a huge lever for the talented individual - Acorn is an incredibly accomplished app and I had no idea a single person wrote it. Equally, they provide a great crutch for the much greater number of not-very-talented people like me to cobble our ideas together into something approaching a polished product. That's new: I certainly couldn't have hoped to get much done writing 6502 assembler, but with a Cocoa book and a few late nights I'm earning actual money from code I wrote.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
I wonder if Core Image is doing a lot of the work for Acorn, I'm not an Apple developer but I remember when it was announced thinking that it would make Photoshop type applications easier to develop.

gjolund 11y ago

Credit where credit is due -> https://github.com/sindresorhus https://github.com/sindresorhus

AndyKelley 11y ago
This guy has me blocked on GitHub and I have no idea why. I've never interacted with him before. I tried to make a simple pull request to fix something and GitHub won't even let me fork his code. I've emailed him and asked if he perhaps blocked me by accident or something and got no response.

CmonDev 11y ago

> Today, such singular achievements appear to be no longer possible. More people than ever are making their own things today.

yAak 11y ago

I didn't realize Acorn was a solo act. I ignored since I bought Pixelmator first, but now I have to go buy Acorn to support the guy just out of respect.

malux85 11y ago

I am a solo programmer. In London. I rarely see anyone in my day to day. I work from home. I binge work, sometimes for 18-24 hours at a time - I loose track. I love it. I love my life. I have almost finished my latest fun project. I'm collecting 25k data points a second. I control 38 servers. I have automated absolutely everything. i would love to sell it now, but not sure how

troncheadle 11y ago
What is it? Where is it? Sounds super cool
segmondy 11y ago
how much are you making? ;-)
- moron4hire 11y ago
  It sounds like, "enough".

jorblume 11y ago

I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling. At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times I ask myself...why is this stupid and what am I going to break? It definitely has its ups and downs. I think the most valuable lesson has been self reliance. No one is fixing this, it's on me. No one is going to refactor this, except for me. edit: spelling :(

zer00eyz 11y ago
I would have to say your in a much different place than these guys were. The internet, open source (the amount of it at least), the FOTM chat client... If you want to talk shop you are more than welcome to contribute to one of the open source projects out there (I'm sure you have a few in the stack). I will say it isn't the same as having a partner in crime at work, but you can get your self exposed to new ideas and thinking if you so choose!
- jorblume 11y ago
  Oh totally, it's a completely different world. I mean look at Stackoverflow. Literally one google search can solve even the more complex problems a programmer might encounter. Like you said, github, meetups, skype...just reading through source code on github helps me immensely.
ProAm 11y ago
> At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. I'm in the same position, it's really lonely being the only technical resource. Just someone to bounce ideas off of. On the other side, everything works and when it doesn't I know exactly why within moments because I wrote it all.
- babuskov 11y ago
  I had this problem for years. And then I picked an open source project that uses the same language and tools and started contributing to it. I made some great friends and the mailing list was always live with discussion that was often much broader than the thing we were building. Over the years we also met live on a couple of conferences, had drings/dinners together and it really helped me fill the void of working alone on commercial side.

snake117 11y ago

That's not to say that it's impossible to do anything on your own nowadays. I hear that it only took one guy to make Evochron Mercenary (http://www.starwraith.com/evochronmercenary/faq.htm#2 http://www.starwraith.com/evochronmercenary/faq.htm#2) and the game takes roughly 1gb. Now, Star Citizen is supposedly the next big space sim; a big team that has raised over $50 million and creating a game that will probably take over a 100gb to install. Heck it took 20gb just for me to demo the dog-fighting module. One developer vs a team backed with millions of dollars. 1gb vs 100gb. It can still happen.

skynetv2 11y ago

Paul's cousin was my colleague a few years ago. He had so many stories to tell about him. He has a personal web site at http://arachnoid.com/ http://arachnoid.com/ I hear he spends most of his time now sailing.

markbnj 11y ago

I like the attitude and point of view here, and I will also lift a glass to all the solo programmers. As far as I am concerned the actual act of writing code has always been transacted between a single brain and a keyboard. The article does seem to have a slightly dated desktop-oriented perspective, though. Isn't it fair to say that the mobile world reinvigorated the solo/small team development project?

westoncb 11y ago

I've been doing the (unpaid) solo thing for years, and I'm almost sure I'm gonna give it up now. I built Tiled Text (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be&t=1m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be...) while working at a grocery store and dealing with a repetitive strain injury, and it was a miserable, awful experience. I designed and built this 'abstract visual debugger': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE while my savings slowly ran out, along with my girlfriend's patience for being ignored. And I've spent a ton of time teaching myself mathematics and programming language fundamentals, and writing on new perspectives on programming tools/languages (http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languages-dont-have.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languag...) —with no real prospects for academic recognition (to say nothing of remuneration), with my historically poor academic record. I think for some people this is the only thing they want to do, and it works out well enough for them. I felt like that was me for a long time, but I've begun to wonder how much of this sort of dedication is motived merely by... baser qualities. In any case: I salute you, solo programmer! —but be careful, eh? It's possible there's a simpler lifestyle that would make you happier.

ioeu 11y ago
Your abstract visual debugger is really cool! I was thinking about pursuing something similar for my bachelor thesis but ended up doing something much different. I'm curious to learn more about your insights regarding the subject, where can I find more information? Also curious to learn what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why? Edit: Going through your submissions now (:
- westoncb 11y ago
  Unfortunately I haven't really written on the ideas behind it, though I probably will soon. A couple people asked me to submit it to the 'Future Programming Workshop,' so I was thinking of putting together some kind of writeup—but I had no money to attend. The main idea was to display a running program's state at the same level of abstraction at which programmers think about their programs. I often found myself writing 'one off' visualizations of data structures for complex pieces of code; this was an attempt at a general solution: it would be able to render all of the different (visual) classes of data structures—the programmer would just need to say which of their data structures should be 'monitored.'

morgante 11y ago

> It needs 7.77 gigabytes of disk space. The “obsolete” word processor I use to write this (Pages 2009) weighs in at 388 megabytes; the newer and dumber Pages version 5.5.3 takes up 478 Mbytes. Binary size is, of course, a poor measure of program complexity. A solo programmer can easily leverage libraries to drive up their total weight significantly.

dagw 11y ago

The game Banished (http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/ http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/) is another modern example of an amazing piece of software turned out by a single programmer.

foldor 11y ago
While we're looking at amazing gaming accomplishments my solo programmers, there's also Axiom Verge (http://www.axiomverge.com/ http://www.axiomverge.com/) which was released on PS4/PC this year.
- genericacct 11y ago
  Interesting coincidence: both are games. In the business world when you buy an app you probably want to make sure that someone will be able to maintain it even if something happens to the project lead.

eloff 11y ago

AFAIK LuaJIT was the work of Solo programmer Mike Pall. He built it on top of Lua, of course, but it's still an incredible feat of engineering and dedication. There are some who speculate that Mike Pall is possibly an alias for a whole team of people, but I think the reality is it's just one hard-working and extremely talented individual. He's now in the process of passing on the torch to the community, after a decade of shepherding LuaJIT.

mgrennan 11y ago

Here is another. He writes in assembler. Steve Gibson GRC.com.

DrNuke 11y ago

Most grunt work is automated and so much knowledge is leveraged even solo-shops can keep all tech together. Good! That said, data from hard-science problems is the new nut to crack. I almost cry thinking of startups like rescale.com, the chance they offer to independent researchers and scientists to do so much more than it can be done in a shared lab or cluster. When I read of $$$ burn rate in the SV, I cringe: one ikea table quoted at $250 is one good full day of work with rescale.com. Unbelievable, make me think VCs and investors should ask for much more value for money when funding science startups.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
Is rescale's offering the equivalent of an Ikea table? I'm not sure of the relevance of the connection.
- kctess5 11y ago
  I think this person might be a bot, most of his comments are borderline non-sensical.
- DrNuke 11y ago
  It may be bootstrapping attitude but instead of a $250 table I would do with a $100 table + $150 on rescale!

perlpimp 11y ago

"The many superpowers of Apple’s Preview (here and here) does justice to the app’s power and flexibility. Read it and join me in my appreciation for this labor of love from a solo, unnamed programmer who, I’m told, has been at it since the NeXT days." Preview is one app that is a source of constant admiration and consistency that makes using OS x that much easier. Maybe a single excellent developer can make better call in terms of consistency because applying similar pattern across board is natural where doing so for more than one person requires a whole lot more effort? (communication, keeping up with a style etc.) While on the same subject can there be some way to make reusable components for visual intefaces ala unix commanline and pipes. If so then developers can do well developing bits of code, each doing one thing well and let users construct their own "solutions"

ant6n 11y ago
Preview is ok. It's clunky for looking at multiple images in a directory. Editing images is just weird - saving the image as you make edits, so you have to revert if you play with something - it breaks a 40 year old opn file-edit file-save file paradigm.

thoman23 11y ago

Hmm, I think it's easier than ever for the solo programmer. Production deployment is easier, research and knowledge sharing is easier, testing is easier, finding a third party library to help is easier...everything is easier. A good programmer can build a product from beginning to end very easily now.

9999 11y ago

Eric Chahi's work on Another World immediately came to mind as a great solo achievement while reading this. This code review written a few years ago is very good: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/ http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

codeshaman 11y ago

It's an interesting period. On one hand, even though the complexity of the app has grown a lot, so have the tools and libraries which are available. Another important aspect of doing it alone is the ability to market your software. If you're not interested in that too much and don't have a spouse or friend who can take care of promoting, selling, customer support, etc, then it's difficult to make a living with it. And of course, the competition is fierce and getting stronger every day. Kids are growing up with computers and devices and they write code. I've just spent 30 minutes playing a 10-year old's game (John Carmak's son, btw :) ). Then there's always the 'open source' way - you start solo and then people join you. My life as a solo programmer has been in ups and downs - making money while working full time as a programmer and then going solo and spending all my savings on experimental projects which so far haven't been commercially successful. Now I have to take a job again and be a 'team player'...

drawkbox 11y ago

Most programming languages were started by solo/independent developers, and some worked many years before anyone else helped. When you look for innovation, somewhere along the line it was an individual or solo dev work of creativity. Great teams are made up of self propelling independent/solo capable developers that can work in a team or parallel on separate products or services in a project. Guido worked on Python for many years before anyone joined in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R52mi-Fyk0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R52mi-Fyk0E

inostia 11y ago

I am a solo dev at a university and a couple advantages I enjoy is that I choose my own technologies, and I am learning all about other aspects of web dev including sys/server admin. I can legitimately say that I am a full-stack engineer, albeit because I was semi forced to learn everything...

heraclez 11y ago

"make a dent" funny how OP nods to steve today when he snitched him to sculley back in the day

boundlessdreamz 11y ago

Fabrice Bellard is the greatest solo programmer IMO. He wrote FFMPEG, QEMU, A PC emulator in Javascript and a ton of other stuff - http://bellard.org/ http://bellard.org/

segmondy 11y ago
The greatest that you know of.
- boundlessdreamz 11y ago
  Yes, of course :)

njx 11y ago

I have been doing solo development of http://bit.ly/1MPBDze http://bit.ly/1MPBDze for so many years, now just business development and occasional coding

pandatigox 11y ago

I think the conclusion really resonates to the Handmade Manifesto that was posted a few days back.

eigenbom 11y ago

Hi to all the other solo devs out there! I've been building http://moonman.io/ http://moonman.io/ mostly by myself for 4 years now, writing all the code (roughly 100k lines of c++) as well as creating all the earlier art and design. Earlier this year I was lucky to be crowdfunded enough to hire an artist and continue working on the game. On projects that span years you find that you're not actually working alone, you're collaborating with your younger self. A younger self who is more naive, more optimistic, sloppier, and who leaves funny comments for you to stumble across years later.

AndyKelley 11y ago

Solo programmer reporting in. I've been working on libsoundio[1], an alternative to PortAudio. This is in the context of Genesis[2], a digital audio workstation. Collaboration is great but sometimes if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. [1]: http://libsound.io/ http://libsound.io/ [2]: http://genesisdaw.org/ http://genesisdaw.org/

meir_yanovich 11y ago

Notch started as totally solo developer for MineCraft.