Jesus, so Torvalds built the MVP for git in 1 day and pretty much scaled it up for kernel usage in 10 days. Now, as a humble average developer, how do I achieve Torvaldian levels of productivity?
* He aches for the very best tool that will suit all his major needs.
* He mentions getting the data structures right first, which is of prime importance. And no, it doesn't mean you start building TreeFactoryAdapter's.
* He codes at the lowest level, in C (please don't whine about assembly), to maintain complete control over memory usage.
To borrow an overused cliché, the code was just the tip of the iceberg. The hidden body of the MVP was the design he had been thinking about for a while. But we, as external observers, can't really see or appreciate what was going on in his head as he planned this out. It doesn't feel like "real" work, which makes the small remaining part that does seem all that much more impressive. This is actually a real source of tension between certain programmers and managers: it's hard for managers to tell actual thinking apart from day-dreaming, so programmers just look lazy in their eyes.
Torvalds wrote about this himself in the interview:
> So I'd like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn't like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I'd seen the problems others had. I'd seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
How do you achieve this level of productivity yourself?
Personally, I think the main quality you want, as I alluded earlier, is comfort. Get yourself to the point where you trust your tools (and yourself) enough to execute your ideas without apprehension. You want to build yourself up to the point where your tools—everything from your programming language to your editor to your libraries—don't get in the way. They should almost feel like extensions of you. Think about it like riding a bicycle or skiing where you start thinking exclusively about where you're going without being distracted by how. Ideally, you want to think about the problem you're solving and the abstraction you're building rather than the mundane details of how you convey this to the computer.