alt Hacker NewsReading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!"
He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability.
Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
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Maybe, but you could also look at it from another angle.
Taking something that’s traditionally been hard and making it dramatically easier, better, and faster unlocks pent-up downstream use-cases.
I’m sure it’s some degree of both selection and execution, but so many industries have been unlocked simply because somebody showed up and figured out how to make a previously difficult thing easy.
Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.
These are your 10x programmers.
Maybe 100x or more in Bertrand’s case.
It’s not about putting in 19 hour days or spitting out more lines of code or PRs or whatever.
It’s coming up with elegant solutions with broad impact that no one else even considered.
> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
The flip side of this, is if you have the ability, you can just pick the hardest problem in your field, go solve it... rinse and repeat.
Everyone can find out what the hardest problems in their field are, it's not a secret, just a question of if you have the ability/gumption/willingness to go spend years of your life attacking a problem like that
One way I like to think of it is that Fabrice creates prototypes interesting enough that other people choose to spend their entire careers maintaining them.
This is the more striking thing. An meme I often repeat is that ideas are cheap, execution is key - there's a trope of "I have a great idea for an app, I just need a developer to do all the work", exacerbated with AI doing all the work.
But this guy is the opposite idea of that. In hindsight, sure, a library doing video is obvious. But the other ones? That's something else.
This is pretty much the rule in journalism, too - timeliness and relevance are king. Man bites dog, etc.
> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
Work on being a positive influence in the world. Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.
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My guess would be the hueristic is "I want to do simple thing, why is it so hard?" (Modern computing has an overabundance of "DX tarpits".)
Which is funny because, everyone has that experience, right? But then approximately nobody proceeds to do something about it. (Including most people who have the skills to make a difference!)
Like, that's surprisingly mundane, and surprisingly actionable.
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If we distil it into a philosophy, it would be something like...
- things should be good
- they are not so good
- I can learn to make them better
And more broadly: "You can just do things"