Fabrice Bellar: Portrait of an Overproductive Programmer
As in the computer industry, there are ordinary PCs and supercomputers, and among developers there are also such giants with super power. How else can you call a person whose list of projects looks like this:
1989: LZEXE
1996: Harissa
1997: Publication of the Bellard formula for calculating the digits of Pi
1999: Linmodem
2000: Calculation of the largest known prime number (source code only 438 bytes)
2000: ffmpeg
2001: TCC Compiler (Tiny C Compiler or TinyCC)
2002: TinyGL
2002: QEmacs
2003: QEMU
2004: TinyCC downloader
2005: DVB-T signal transmitter from computer to TV
2009: World record for calculating Pi
2011: Linux computer emulator on javascript
Each of these programs could be the crown of a career for any developer, but Fabrice Bellar continues to work.
Fabrice Bellar (left) and Miguel de Icaza (founder of the GNOME and Mono projects) at the MIX conference 07 (June 2007)
')
Of course, many successful programs are made on inspiration in just a few days with almost no sleep. But this does not mean that you can really create a dozen of such successful programs. After all, each project must then be supported. For example, when Bellar at the age of 17 created LZEXE (the first popular packer of executable files under MS-DOS), he simply gave the program to several friends and uploaded it to BBS. The popularity came by itself and became quite unexpected for the author. This is perhaps the only program of Bellara, which did not require further support. For the rest of the projects, he spent a huge amount of time to ensure functionality on a variety of platforms, to give the project and documentation such a view that the community could take on its development. All this subsequent draft work requires an order of magnitude more time than writing the original code.
Fabrice Bellara’s uniqueness is not so much in his excellent ideas (although there are very few such developers), as in the truly incredible ability to realize and shape these ideas in the form of ready-made programs that are useful to others. He constantly creates applications that are becoming popular and are widely used by other programmers.
Take at least QEMU. Like all the other well-known programs of Bellara, it is fully freely distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL), originally created under Linux, ported to various platforms and is now almost completely supported by others. Before the advent of QEMU, many emulators formally met the requirements of openness and versatility, but it was the Bellar’s ​​development that possessed a combination of performance, reliability and versatility that was unattainable for a single competitor. The merit of Bellar is not that he came up with the idea of ​​hardware emulation, but that he was able to transfer it to the tools of an ordinary programmer and a tester. Now QEMU is a truly indispensable tool for many.
It seems that Bellar managed to find a balance between extremes that interfere with productive work. Every few years, he masters new areas: data compression, numerical methods, signal processing, media formats, but he retains the same clean C, relevant abstractions and commitment to open licenses. Bellar is not inclined to self-promotion (for example, politely refuses to be interviewed), but the army of programmers and users makes extensive use of the products he creates. For example, among 654 guidelines on copyright in the source code of QEMU 0.13.0, only 216 belong to it. In other words, he so successfully launched the project that soon after the launch, other programmers invested in it twice as much intellectual property as the author himself!
Fabrice Bellar was born in 1972 and, like many of us, got his first programming experience on a scientific calculator (he had it TI-59). Many of the above projects were made as part of student projects while studying at the Paris Polytechnic School, where he enrolled in 1990. Graduates of this famous educational institution include Gustave Gaspard Coriolis, Henri Poincaré and Benoit Mandelbrot. For example, even TinyGL, released in 2002, originated from the VReng Virtual Reality Engine 3D engine, on which Bellar began work in 1998.
His record for calculating the number of Pi on a home computer, surpassing the results of similar calculations on supercomputers, also probably leads the roots of children's experiments with compact programs for the calculator.
Fabrice Bellar is a kind of superhero from programming. His programs, such as QEMU, LZEXE and FFmpeg, are used thousands of times a day around the world by many people who have not even heard his name. But his “superpower” is not the same as in comic book characters, it is not associated with supernormal abilities, such as the ability to fly or move in time. Instead, discipline, confidence, accuracy, and many years of practice are much more important.
via Software Quality Connection
1989: LZEXE
1996: Harissa
1997: Publication of the Bellard formula for calculating the digits of Pi
1999: Linmodem
2000: Calculation of the largest known prime number (source code only 438 bytes)
2000: ffmpeg
2001: TCC Compiler (Tiny C Compiler or TinyCC)
2002: TinyGL
2002: QEmacs
2003: QEMU
2004: TinyCC downloader
2005: DVB-T signal transmitter from computer to TV
2009: World record for calculating Pi
2011: Linux computer emulator on javascript
Each of these programs could be the crown of a career for any developer, but Fabrice Bellar continues to work.
Fabrice Bellar (left) and Miguel de Icaza (founder of the GNOME and Mono projects) at the MIX conference 07 (June 2007)
')
Of course, many successful programs are made on inspiration in just a few days with almost no sleep. But this does not mean that you can really create a dozen of such successful programs. After all, each project must then be supported. For example, when Bellar at the age of 17 created LZEXE (the first popular packer of executable files under MS-DOS), he simply gave the program to several friends and uploaded it to BBS. The popularity came by itself and became quite unexpected for the author. This is perhaps the only program of Bellara, which did not require further support. For the rest of the projects, he spent a huge amount of time to ensure functionality on a variety of platforms, to give the project and documentation such a view that the community could take on its development. All this subsequent draft work requires an order of magnitude more time than writing the original code.
Fabrice Bellara’s uniqueness is not so much in his excellent ideas (although there are very few such developers), as in the truly incredible ability to realize and shape these ideas in the form of ready-made programs that are useful to others. He constantly creates applications that are becoming popular and are widely used by other programmers.
Take at least QEMU. Like all the other well-known programs of Bellara, it is fully freely distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL), originally created under Linux, ported to various platforms and is now almost completely supported by others. Before the advent of QEMU, many emulators formally met the requirements of openness and versatility, but it was the Bellar’s ​​development that possessed a combination of performance, reliability and versatility that was unattainable for a single competitor. The merit of Bellar is not that he came up with the idea of ​​hardware emulation, but that he was able to transfer it to the tools of an ordinary programmer and a tester. Now QEMU is a truly indispensable tool for many.
It seems that Bellar managed to find a balance between extremes that interfere with productive work. Every few years, he masters new areas: data compression, numerical methods, signal processing, media formats, but he retains the same clean C, relevant abstractions and commitment to open licenses. Bellar is not inclined to self-promotion (for example, politely refuses to be interviewed), but the army of programmers and users makes extensive use of the products he creates. For example, among 654 guidelines on copyright in the source code of QEMU 0.13.0, only 216 belong to it. In other words, he so successfully launched the project that soon after the launch, other programmers invested in it twice as much intellectual property as the author himself!
Fabrice Bellar was born in 1972 and, like many of us, got his first programming experience on a scientific calculator (he had it TI-59). Many of the above projects were made as part of student projects while studying at the Paris Polytechnic School, where he enrolled in 1990. Graduates of this famous educational institution include Gustave Gaspard Coriolis, Henri Poincaré and Benoit Mandelbrot. For example, even TinyGL, released in 2002, originated from the VReng Virtual Reality Engine 3D engine, on which Bellar began work in 1998.
His record for calculating the number of Pi on a home computer, surpassing the results of similar calculations on supercomputers, also probably leads the roots of children's experiments with compact programs for the calculator.
Fabrice Bellar is a kind of superhero from programming. His programs, such as QEMU, LZEXE and FFmpeg, are used thousands of times a day around the world by many people who have not even heard his name. But his “superpower” is not the same as in comic book characters, it is not associated with supernormal abilities, such as the ability to fly or move in time. Instead, discipline, confidence, accuracy, and many years of practice are much more important.
via Software Quality Connection
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/119455/
All Articles