How he had time to work a director-level job at , develop a new programming language, oversee/participate in the OSS work for LLVM/Clang/Swift, and build things like these I'll never know.
I know there is a ton of hero worship for him, but it's actually not that uncommon. You don't have to work yourself to death to get stuff done, despite what folks may think or parade as "the way to be" for startups. If you find yourself working yourself to death over any serious length of time, you shouldn't be doing that job.
My VP is a world class ping-pong player, does just as much, etc.
You delegate things well enough and build good enough teams that you don't have to worry about this.
IE he did none of the things you mention alone, he built teams that were effective at doing those things.
When folks point out he isn't still the lead author of llvm or clang and hasn't been for a long time (at least on those projects, he hasn't written a patch in a while), people see it as slighting Chris. But it's not. The way you have time to do the stuff you are talking about is by building up communities, teams, and infrastructures so you don't have to be contributing to them all the time.
Nobody really scales by being infinitely faster/better, they scale by building up people.
"The computer industry has a lot of remarkable people in it, but they’re low-dimensional. Alan Kay is very high dimensional: a big space of instincts and interests and capabilities. I mean, the guy could design furniture. He planned a whole programming language while he was building a harpsichord. He was able to do the two things concurrently."
I would bet on relentless compartmentalisation, i.e., making sure he kept on going and took advantage of the different contexts to get a breather/clear his mind for the others.
But he does mention the house took months to build, and handcrafts are a great hobby...
To some extent Apple's secrecy makes it easier to compartmentalize. You're literally forbidden by work from talking to people outside the company including friends and family. Now assuming you don't take that to mean 'always be at work', it's not all bad. That was my experience there.
> "You're literally forbidden by work from talking to people outside the company including friends and family."
Wait, what? This is the first I've heard of Apple forbidding you from talking to anyone else. Unless you mean specifically about the project, and not just ever and about anything?
>> "How he had time to work a director-level job at , develop a new programming language, oversee/participate in the OSS work for LLVM/Clang/Swift"
Weren't all these things part of his job at Apple? Things he could reasonably do during working hours? If so the question is how did he have a job + spare time which is easier to answer.
He was a director, so a lot of his job was coordinating the entire development tools team. He fit in some amount of development during the day, and did a lot of nights and weekends (or at least that's what I've been gathering from the interview so far; only part way through, looking forward to the commute home).
https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/736237407016607744 https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/818499400313909249
How he had time to work a director-level job at , develop a new programming language, oversee/participate in the OSS work for LLVM/Clang/Swift, and build things like these I'll never know.