
A Salute to Solo Programmers - chmars
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/24/a-salute-to-solo-programmers/
======
jorblume
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 :(

~~~
ProAm
> 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
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.

~~~
what-no-tests
This!

~~~
ddorian43
Since there are no more upvote-points, we can't know how many people agree
with the comment, so "this" are again required (or show alternative).

~~~
TheDong
I do not need to know how many people agree with something to know whether I
agree or disagree with it.

There's no need to show upvote points; just order it so I'm more likely to
read the things that other people think are worth reading. I can judge it
myself without seeing N "this" comments or upvote points beside it.

~~~
lfowles
Whoooosh

------
westoncb
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be&t=1m30s))
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-languag...](http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-
languages-dont-have.html)) —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
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
>... what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another
lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why?

There are a lot of things that have gone into that question. I would say the
biggest thing was that I became aware of the fact that I was always 'in my
head' instead of having a more direct interaction with people/environment, and
realizing (from a number of sources, but importantly, through meditation) that
being not 'in your head'—direct interaction with things—is a major part of
feeling content or satisfied (as well as being effective in... most domains).
Makes sense if you think about it: you think when you are trying to change
something; if nothing needs changing, you don't think and you're content.

Now I'm looking for a balance with social interaction, physical activity, and
intellectual work. Since I've been unable to earn money from my own projects,
I am giving them up to just do a normal 40hrs/week kind of programming job: if
I try to do the job and the projects, there's no time for the balance I want.

After a few years I may get a job that's more physical/social and return to my
projects, but for now I need to catch up on finances, and programming is the
only way I know how.

Edit: another way of saying the above: anxiety/depression became a problem,
and the balance I describe seems to be a major part of the solution.

~~~
ioeu
I can relate to what you're describing, thanks for sharing.

Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social
interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells
me I'll end up depressed.

I've been told more than once I should look into meditation, do you know of a
good way to start?

~~~
westoncb
> Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social
> interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells
> me I'll end up depressed.

Yep! That's the struggle.

This guy has a pretty nice intro, with a quick 10 minute or so practice you
can do:
[https://youtu.be/3Uqoxo_jPXQ?t=3m33s](https://youtu.be/3Uqoxo_jPXQ?t=3m33s)

Then there's this book which works pretty well as an intro because it's a
collection of diverse perspectives, from different people, on the subject:
[http://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Meditation-
Inspiration...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Meditation-Inspiration-
Contemporary/dp/1611800579)

Alan Watts is also generally pretty good—can find talks from him on youtube,
and he's written many books.

~~~
ioeu
Thanks! I'll hopefully have a look, at some point.

------
malux85
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

~~~
segmondy
how much are you making? ;-)

~~~
moron4hire
It sounds like, "enough".

------
eigenbom
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.

------
perlpimp
"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
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.

------
dagw
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
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
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.

------
zer00eyz
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
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
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
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.

~~~
s73v3r
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.

------
eloff
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.

------
boundlessdreamz
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
The greatest that you know of.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Yes, of course :)

------
markbnj
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?

------
scrumper
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
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.

------
drawkbox
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)

------
codeshaman
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'...

------
gjolund
Credit where credit is due

-> [https://github.com/sindresorhus](https://github.com/sindresorhus)

~~~
AndyKelley
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.

------
morgante
> 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.

------
snake117
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.

------
AndyKelley
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/)

------
9999
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/)

------
DrNuke
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
Is rescale's offering the equivalent of an Ikea table? I'm not sure of the
relevance of the connection.

~~~
DrNuke
It may be bootstrapping attitude but instead of a $250 table I would do with a
$100 table + $150 on rescale!

------
CmonDev
_> Today, such singular achievements appear to be no longer possible._

More people than ever are making their own things today.

------
thoman23
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.

------
inostia
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...

------
skynetv2
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.

------
njx
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

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

------
yAak
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.

------
meir_yanovich
Notch started as totally solo developer for MineCraft.

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

------
curiousjorge
this sounds like me

------
heraclez
"make a dent"

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

