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One Man Armies


In an overdecorated office somewhere in California, there is someone being paid so much money they could take six months of their salary, move to Brazil, and never work another day in their life — and yet this person is getting a remarkably little amount of work done every day. Just down the street, in a similar-looking office, there is a similar-looking person who is producing astonishing work at a breakneck pace.

The variation in human output is kind of insane. What some may consider impossible without a team and $5M can sometimes be built by a single person who cares a lot and works hard. It’s easy to understimate just how much a one person army can achieve.

So here are some of our favorite one-person (or mostly one-person) projects. We’re not including things that you wouldn't be surprised one person made, like a music album or a novel, though those are also very impressive.

  • Stardew Valley was made by Eric Barone, who put in 70 hours a week for 4.5 years before releasing the game for the first time. He still updates the game with loads of new content.
  • Linux was created by Linus Torvalds. He is not responsible for all of Linux and did not do everything single handedly, but he was its origin (which was a lot of work).
  • Minecraft, before it sold to Microsoft, was developed by Markus Persson. It took him 2 years!
  • The Art of Computer Programming is a massive tome of a lot of knowledge about computer programming and algorithms and math. It’s used by all sorts of people (from scientists to mathematicians to linguists) and it is not yet done. The one person behind this book is Donald Knuth.
  • The Sagrada Familia was designed by Antonio Gaudí, who spent more than 40 years of his life on it.
  • The first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor, which discovered the rift valley in the Mid-Atlantic ridge and was foundational evidence for the plate tectonics theory, was created solo by Marie Tharp. Bruce Heezen, a colleague, collected the raw data as women were not allowed to work on ships at the time. 
  • The Coral Castle, a kind of weird-but-cool garden of structures in Florida, was built singlehandedly by a Latvian immigrant named Edward Leedskalnin. When asked how he moved such heavy rocks on his own for his structures, he said he knew the secrets of those who built the Pyramids.
  • The first version of a computer program was written in the 1800s by Ava Lovelace.
  • The Cathedral of Justo in Spain was designed and built almost exclusively by Justo Gallego Martinez. He worked on it for the better part of his life, all the way up until he died.
  • Rollercoaster Tycoon, a game you should definitely play, was made by Chris Sawyer.
  • Kenshi, a complex RPG game, was made in 12 years by Chris Hunt.
  • The Theory of General Relativity, as you probably know, was created by this guy.
  • jQuery was made by one person: John Resig. Fun fact, he works at Khan Academy as of this writing.
  • Christianity, though it later spread in many other ways, was pioneered by Jesus of Nazareth.
  • Islam, though it also later spread in many ways, was pioneered by Muhammad ibn Abdullah.
  • Light is a series of seven operas, one for each day of the week. It takes nearly 30 hours to perform. It was composed over decades by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
  • 24 Preludes, Op. 28 by Frédéric Chopin is a project that includes one prelude for each key. He wrote it entirely on his own. Many of these pieces were masterpieces and pushed the boundaries of piano at the time. Beethoven, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Mozart, Bartók, Bach, Scriabin, Debussy, and the list goes on — many of the most influential composers also put together most of their ambitious projects solo.

You can take away whatever you want from this list. One takeaway is that it is extremely impressive. If the Theory of General Relativity, entire cathedrals, 29-hour operas, and billion-dollar video games can be made by a single person, you should know there’s probably a good chance that the next time you send a Slack message that says, “I’m blocked here until Jake updates the spreadsheet”, you are probably wrong. At least if you care enough.

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