4 ms·

Jesus, so Torvalds built the MVP for git in 1 day and pretty much scaled it up for kernel usage in 10 days. Now, as a humble average developer, how do I achieve

by ffn 12y ago

Jesus, so Torvalds built the MVP for git in 1 day and pretty much scaled it up for kernel usage in 10 days. Now, as a humble average developer, how do I achieve Torvaldian levels of productivity?

cms07 12y ago
Spend your better years inside during the 9 months of Finnish Winter.
Crito 12y ago
Work smarter, not harder. The reason he was able to get git up and running so fast is because it is fundamentally a very simple system. If you check out the first commit of git in its own git repo, you can see just how simple it is yourself. In that first commit it is barely anything, yet it was sufficient to write a commit for itself.
vinceguidry 12y ago
Well, he'd been collecting ideas and requirements for a long time in his head before he finally made a system out of it. The vast majority of the time, what you're building isn't all that clear to you before you have to start. So there's a lot of time wasted just figuring that out. Cut that wasted time out and you become a powerhouse.
divs1210 12y ago
As someone pointed out, locking yourself in could definitely be a catalyst. How to develop his sensibilities has a very different answer, though - Have High Standards. * He aches for the very best tool that will suit all his major needs. * He mentions getting the data structures right first, which is of prime importance. And no, it doesn't mean you start building TreeFactoryAdapter's. * He codes at the lowest level, in C (please don't whine about assembly), to maintain complete control over memory usage. I shudder to think what he would come up with if he ever decides to take Common Lisp on a test ride.
tikhonj 12y ago
It was something at the top of his head, enough that he had a coherent mental model of what he wanted to build. The actual coding was less designing git as much as putting an existing design down in executable notation. Couple this with decades of programming experience—enough, crucially, to express his thoughts comfortably, without getting distracted by the incidental minutia of actual programming—and you get feats that seem almost super-human. To borrow an overused cliché, the code was just the tip of the iceberg. The hidden body of the MVP was the design he had been thinking about for a while. But we, as external observers, can't really see or appreciate what was going on in his head as he planned this out. It doesn't feel like "real" work, which makes the small remaining part that does seem all that much more impressive. This is actually a real source of tension between certain programmers and managers: it's hard for managers to tell actual thinking apart from day-dreaming, so programmers just look lazy in their eyes. Torvalds wrote about this himself in the interview: > So I'd like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn't like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I'd seen the problems others had. I'd seen what I wanted to avoid doing. How do you achieve this level of productivity yourself? Personally, I think the main quality you want, as I alluded earlier, is comfort. Get yourself to the point where you trust your tools (and yourself) enough to execute your ideas without apprehension. You want to build yourself up to the point where your tools—everything from your programming language to your editor to your libraries—don't get in the way. They should almost feel like extensions of you. Think about it like riding a bicycle or skiing where you start thinking exclusively about where you're going without being distracted by how. Ideally, you want to think about the problem you're solving and the abstraction you're building rather than the mundane details of how you convey this to the computer.
msvan 12y ago
I think there's a lot of value in that period of time before the first commit. Rich Hickey supposedly spent two years thinking about Clojure before even writing a single line of code, and I'm sure Torvalds spent an equivalent amount of time seeing pain points with BitKeeper before writing git.
serve_yay 12y ago
Try working on pretty much only one thing for 20 years and see what that gets you.

by ffn 12y ago

Jesus, so Torvalds built the MVP for git in 1 day and pretty much scaled it up for kernel usage in 10 days. Now, as a humble average developer, how do I achieve Torvaldian levels of productivity?

cms07 12y ago

Spend your better years inside during the 9 months of Finnish Winter.

Crito 12y ago

Work smarter, not harder. The reason he was able to get git up and running so fast is because it is fundamentally a very simple system. If you check out the first commit of git in its own git repo, you can see just how simple it is yourself. In that first commit it is barely anything, yet it was sufficient to write a commit for itself.

vinceguidry 12y ago

Well, he'd been collecting ideas and requirements for a long time in his head before he finally made a system out of it. The vast majority of the time, what you're building isn't all that clear to you before you have to start. So there's a lot of time wasted just figuring that out. Cut that wasted time out and you become a powerhouse.

divs1210 12y ago

As someone pointed out, locking yourself in could definitely be a catalyst. How to develop his sensibilities has a very different answer, though - Have High Standards. * He aches for the very best tool that will suit all his major needs. * He mentions getting the data structures right first, which is of prime importance. And no, it doesn't mean you start building TreeFactoryAdapter's. * He codes at the lowest level, in C (please don't whine about assembly), to maintain complete control over memory usage. I shudder to think what he would come up with if he ever decides to take Common Lisp on a test ride.

tikhonj 12y ago

It was something at the top of his head, enough that he had a coherent mental model of what he wanted to build. The actual coding was less designing git as much as putting an existing design down in executable notation. Couple this with decades of programming experience—enough, crucially, to express his thoughts comfortably, without getting distracted by the incidental minutia of actual programming—and you get feats that seem almost super-human. To borrow an overused cliché, the code was just the tip of the iceberg. The hidden body of the MVP was the design he had been thinking about for a while. But we, as external observers, can't really see or appreciate what was going on in his head as he planned this out. It doesn't feel like "real" work, which makes the small remaining part that does seem all that much more impressive. This is actually a real source of tension between certain programmers and managers: it's hard for managers to tell actual thinking apart from day-dreaming, so programmers just look lazy in their eyes. Torvalds wrote about this himself in the interview: > So I'd like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn't like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I'd seen the problems others had. I'd seen what I wanted to avoid doing. How do you achieve this level of productivity yourself? Personally, I think the main quality you want, as I alluded earlier, is comfort. Get yourself to the point where you trust your tools (and yourself) enough to execute your ideas without apprehension. You want to build yourself up to the point where your tools—everything from your programming language to your editor to your libraries—don't get in the way. They should almost feel like extensions of you. Think about it like riding a bicycle or skiing where you start thinking exclusively about where you're going without being distracted by how. Ideally, you want to think about the problem you're solving and the abstraction you're building rather than the mundane details of how you convey this to the computer.

msvan 12y ago

I think there's a lot of value in that period of time before the first commit. Rich Hickey supposedly spent two years thinking about Clojure before even writing a single line of code, and I'm sure Torvalds spent an equivalent amount of time seeing pain points with BitKeeper before writing git.

serve_yay 12y ago

Try working on pretty much only one thing for 20 years and see what that gets you.