When I look at all the "Kinda interesting" projects on my hard drive that died out halfway-through, and compare myself to Fabrice, I think that Fabrice is merely:
- One of the least lazy people ever
- Mentally healthy
- Not publishing small projects he does for himself
- Able to consistently pick projects that are both useful and clearly-scoped.
The project-picking trick is, make programs that work on existing data.
When I make a game, 100 hours of work does not yield even 1 hour of good gameplay, and the game doesn't do anything but let you play the game.
But when Fabrice makes QEMU, there is already a bunch of OS images you can try out in it. When he makes ffmpeg, there is already a bunch of media files to decode and transcode with it. When he makes JSLinux, there is already Linux stuff to play with. And QuickJS runs existing JavaScript code.
Being too original sinks a project. Every time you see a fun project like "I made my own virtual machine, OS, and language," remember, that project is a game, which provided 100 hours of fun for the developer and maybe 1 hour for you. The game is self-contained and doesn't gain any value by inter-operating with the rest of reality, because the VM, OS, and lang are all one-offs.
Fabrice isn't held back by the idealism of "I'll rewrite the world all at once". His stuff is great because he's replacing individual components with stuff that works better, in the same machine. Like GNU did.
This is in a nutshell what great software design is all about. Always asking the question, what is the least amount of work I have to do to achieve the most results?
Refactoring tons of code gets you used to seeing these patterns, but he is operating at a much higher level of abstraction.
He is clearly an incredible smart guy, but I had the same thought. He work projects that most of us would never start, and that elevates him even higher.
The interesting part, me being dumber, how much of could I accomplice assuming the same level of dicipline and similar routines?
His/thier history is documented on Wikipedia, but its possible just one representative has shown up to events in the past.
Even for a small team the output would be incredible, but I choose to believe it is just one super-human. One day I hope to meet him.