The creator of ffmpeg Fabrice Bellard(1) is truly a genius and has created so many amazing software that have been an amazing benefit to the world.
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.
Probably part of the explanation for the productivity XD
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.
Fabrice Bellard started FFMpeg, but doesn't work on it anymore. He also started a few other little projects incuding most famously QEMU.
One 10x programmer = a 1/10th Bellard?