How much of it is genius and how much of it is just an amazingly productive work ethic?

Or maybe it requires genius to be this productive?

I'm just amazed at what some people are able to build. Especially open source. Does he make money from ffmpeg? Or just do it as a side gig?

Reminds me of the photopea guy. He has basically built a browser based clone of photoshop. Something that took Adobe thousands of engineers and decades to build up over time.

Yeah, genius could even be an understatement in my opinion. He is up there with the greatest of the greats. Anyone with a quarter of his productive output would easily qualify as genius already. He has basically no presence online besides his remarkabke work and of course that only strengthens the legend.

> He has basically no presence online

Probably part of the explanation for the productivity XD

Presence online is overrated.

> Something that took Adobe thousands of engineers and decades to build up over time.

It's not true in every case, but the efficiency of solo developers and tiny teams is a massive advantage vs. inefficient huge teams crippled by corporate bureaucracy and layers of management. Even though the latter has astronomical budget vs the first, it doesn't actually guarantee better software.

It's genius. LZEXE creator, 3x Obfuscated C Code Contest winner, record breaking Pi calculator.

Fabrice Bellard started FFMpeg, but doesn't work on it anymore. He also started a few other little projects incuding most famously QEMU.

Yeah definitely. If programming genius had a unit it should be called the bellard.

I’m now thinking about how that would work. Something like;

One 10x programmer = a 1/10th Bellard?

Don't forget tcc, the tiny C compiler. You can compile all 6MB of sqlite3 in 0.1 seconds.

Definitely impressive, but don't forget all the open source libs available now. Decades ago you needed all those folks to build the infrastructure that didn't exist these days for free.

Fabrice's no-frills website has way more rad shit than all the bullshit Nathan Myhrvold pays PR firms to promote.

In 2004 I started using QEMU for testing (because it was so much faster than Bochs). My business partner wrote a note to fabrice@bellard.org to thank him for his nice and useful tool, and he replied back about how pleased he was that we used his tool :) Amazing guy.