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 in 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.
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.
I'll bring up a remark John Carmack made (paraphrasing): "All the small games we made for Softdisk were not worth remembering, but I'd like to think that the work that we've put during that time was what ultimately allowed us to build better games".
With that I mean, we romanticize programmers to the point where we forget what they made them great. They worked and made stuff no one will ever remember or know, but it was NECESSARY work that led them to build the stuff worth remembering.
As for social proof, here's the concept: your reputation consists of your greatest achievements, not your greatest failures. I'll use Jonathan Blow as an example. He's the creator of Braid. He will always be known as the creator of Braid. One huge massively loved breakout hit is all you need to cement your reputation as an outstanding programmer. You could work on a dozen things nobody's ever heard of before and after that breakout hit and it doesn't matter.
The tricky thing is you never know what's going to be big and successful and what's going to be forgotten. That's why most outstanding programmers swing for the fences. They make things that are BIG. They're ambitious. You're not going to become recognized for outstanding work by making yet another ECS system in Rust. It has to be a step above in some way.
That said, to make a big, ambitious, impressive ECS system in Rust, you need to understand the problem extremely well. You do that by making unimpressive ECS systems in Rust. See previous point about compound interest.
I remember he made Braid, but I'm more interested in Jai.
I also don't think they make it for the fame, they make it because they can see that it could be made, or at least should be attempted, as it's better and hasn't been done.
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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 in 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.
I'll bring up a remark John Carmack made (paraphrasing): "All the small games we made for Softdisk were not worth remembering, but I'd like to think that the work that we've put during that time was what ultimately allowed us to build better games".
With that I mean, we romanticize programmers to the point where we forget what they made them great. They worked and made stuff no one will ever remember or know, but it was NECESSARY work that led them to build the stuff worth remembering.
There is a little bit more. Look up the concepts of social proof and compound interest.
Here's a helpful piece on compound interest: https://tynan.com/thekey/
As for social proof, here's the concept: your reputation consists of your greatest achievements, not your greatest failures. I'll use Jonathan Blow as an example. He's the creator of Braid. He will always be known as the creator of Braid. One huge massively loved breakout hit is all you need to cement your reputation as an outstanding programmer. You could work on a dozen things nobody's ever heard of before and after that breakout hit and it doesn't matter.
The tricky thing is you never know what's going to be big and successful and what's going to be forgotten. That's why most outstanding programmers swing for the fences. They make things that are BIG. They're ambitious. You're not going to become recognized for outstanding work by making yet another ECS system in Rust. It has to be a step above in some way.
That said, to make a big, ambitious, impressive ECS system in Rust, you need to understand the problem extremely well. You do that by making unimpressive ECS systems in Rust. See previous point about compound interest.
I remember he made Braid, but I'm more interested in Jai.
I also don't think they make it for the fame, they make it because they can see that it could be made, or at least should be attempted, as it's better and hasn't been done.