The BitTorrent Effect looks at Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, who entered a “starving artist” period after quitting his job at MojoNation:
What kept Cohen going, say friends and family, was a cartoonishly inflated ego. “I can come off as pretty arrogant, but it’s because I know I’m right,” he laughs. “I’m very, very good at writing protocols. I’ve accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team.” While we’re having lunch, his wife, Jenna, tells me about the time they were watching Amadeus, where Mozart writes his music so rapidly and perfectly it appears to have been dictated by God. Cohen decided he was kind of like that. Like Mozart? Bram and Jenna nod.“Bram will just pace around the house all day long, back and forth, in and out of the kitchen. Then he’ll suddenly go to his computer and the code just comes pouring out. And you can see by the lines on the screen that it’s clean,” Jenna says. “It’s clean code.” She pats her husband affectionately on the head: “My sweet little autistic nerd boy.” (Cohen in fact has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.)
By the way, this passage intrigued me:
Cohen says he loves Amazons, a cross between chess and the Japanese game Go, because it is pure strategy. Players take turns dropping more and more tokens on a grid, trying to box in their opponent.