Sindre Sorhus

About Sindre Sorhus

61 apps 12 years of app craft 1.1K+ repos 15 years of open source

Hi, I’m Sindre (hear how to say it). I make apps and open-source software, full time and on my own. In 2014, I quit my office job to backpack around Southeast Asia and work on open source. The backpacking ended, but the open source never did.

My time goes to apps for Apple devices and to open source. The apps are small, focused tools that each solve one problem well, and many of them are free. You can read what people say about them, or see what I’m working on now.

In open source, I maintain many npm packages and popular projects, from Node.js libraries to CLI tools and Swift packages, and I started Awesome, the lists about all kinds of interesting topics.

NowTraveling in Vietnam. Drinking Cà phê muối. Working on a new secret Mac app. Trying to fix all bugs in my open-source projects (yes, really).

Some Things About Me

  • Grew up in Norway
  • Started with LEGO, then made simple websites at nine
    • My LEGO city took up almost the whole bedroom
  • Didn’t learn programming properly until my twenties
    • Before that, I copied PHP and JavaScript without quite understanding them
  • Got into open source by contributing to TodoMVC, and later became one of its maintainers
  • Speak Swift, JavaScript, English, and Norwegian, in that order
  • Not a company, just me
  • Coined the term “ponyfill”
  • Started Awesome, one of the most-starred repos on GitHub
  • Love Cà phê muối, Es yen, and Kaeng khiao wan
    • Vietnamese salt coffee, Thai iced espresso, and Thai green curry
  • Once coded for 43 hours straight. Would not recommend
  • Unicorns everywhere. Open source is hard work, so it should also be fun
  • On tabs since the ’90s
  • Permanent dark mode

How I Learned to Make Things

At school, we watched Flash movies and played Flash games in every break. I wanted to know how they were made, but unlike websites, they had no “View Source”. So I decompiled them. Nobody obfuscated their files back then, so everything was there to see.

Then I started to change them. I redrew the characters, added new enemies, and put in high scores. I didn’t really understand the code. I changed things, broke them, and changed them back until the game did what I wanted. The first time other people played a game I had glued together, I was very proud.

That is still how I learn. I take something apart to see how it works, and then I make my own. Today, it’s macOS internals instead of Flash games.

The Apps That Made Me Want to Make Apps

In 2007, I left Windows for my first Mac, a 17-inch MacBook Pro, right in the middle of what people called the “Delicious Generation”. The name came from Delicious Library, an app that put your books and movies on a realistic wooden shelf. Independent developers were making Mac apps that felt more like crafted objects than software, and Coda and Things were my favorites. Coda put a whole web workflow (editor, preview, file transfer, and terminal) into one beautiful window. Things made a to-do list feel calm. Small teams made them, and every detail felt cared for.

I remember thinking: “One day, I’m going to make an app on that level.”

Then, for a long time, nothing happened. My biggest blocker was Objective-C. It never clicked with me: the square brackets, the manual memory management, the header files. So I made websites, and then open source, and then much more open source. In 2014, Apple released Swift, and that changed everything. I started learning it the same day.

The first app still took three more years. In January 2017, I got an idea for a small Mac app and had some free time, so I jumped right in and learned what I needed as I went. A month later, I released my first Mac app. It was a battery indicator. Not exactly Coda. But after ten years of dreaming, it took one month to make.

That era is mostly gone. Even Delicious Library shut down in 2024. But the goal is still the same: make apps that would wow the younger me who opened Coda for the first time. Apple has featured some of them, but none of them are on that level yet. I’m slowly getting there.

Changelog

Some Things I Believe

  • I’m all in on AI
    • It’s the biggest shift in how software gets made in my lifetime, and I use it every day
    • The bottleneck is no longer writing code. It’s taste, judgment, and knowing what to build
    • With AI, I can make, verify, and ship a fix faster than I can review a pull request for it
    • I still own the result. The design, the decisions, and the quality bar are mine
  • I make things for fun, and to solve my own problems
    • The easiest way to build a great app is to be your own customer
    • Enthusiasm is an input. It’s easier to do great work on things that excite you
    • Optimize for Monthly Happiness Percentage, not monthly recurring revenue. If some apps earn money, that’s a bonus
  • Focus is a feature
    • An app should do one thing well. Every “yes” makes the next “no” harder
    • Bloat doesn’t arrive in one release. It arrives one reasonable feature at a time
    • Focus lets me go deeper than the screenshot. A surface idea gets cloned in weeks, but taste, trust, and depth are hard to copy
    • Small, focused modules are LEGO bricks. Build big things out of small, finished pieces
  • One person can still make things that matter
    • From Apple’s “Think Different” ad: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” It’s at the bottom of every page on this site
  • The real cost of software is supporting it
    • Every feature is a promise to maintain it
    • Hacks break with the next OS update, and then they turn into support email
    • Free APIs go away, so I don’t depend on them
    • A platform feature that makes my package obsolete is a win. Node.js made seven of them obsolete
  • Native apps are better
    • Faster, smaller, and at home on the platform. Most of my apps are below 4 MB
    • Fit in, don’t stand out. The best app feels like it came with the system
    • I support only the latest macOS and iOS, and spend the time on making the apps better instead
    • Redesign only when it helps. Change for the sake of change creates work for everyone and value for no one
  • The people who use my apps deserve respect
    • No ads, no tracking, and no personal data
    • Pay once, own forever
    • Prices in whole dollars, not $4.99. I have no wish to manipulate my users. Small ethical choices compound
    • Behind every issue and support email is a real person. Empathy and kindness matter as much as code
  • Readability beats cleverness
    • Code is read far more often than it’s written
    • Silent on success, loud on failure

By the Numbers

Apps

  • 61 apps
  • 31 free apps
  • 6M+ users
  • 12 years of craft
  • 2.4K+ App Store ratings
  • 4.7 average rating
  • 10K+ support emails answered

Open Source

  • 15 years of open source
  • 1.1K+ repos
  • 1.1M+ stars on my repos
  • 84K+ followers
  • 26K+ issues closed
  • 15K+ pull requests merged from others
  • 50K+ contributions
  • 37K+ commits
  • 2.4K+ pull requests opened
  • 4.7K+ code reviews
  • 71K+ comments
  • 82 days in a row with contributions
  • 388 busiest day, February 8, 2015
  • Fri busiest weekday

npm

  • 1K+ packages
  • 700K+ dependents
  • 5 of the 10 most-downloaded packages
  • 18B+ downloads a week
  • 30K+ downloads a second
  • 8% of all npm downloads

Discover

Package of the Day

parent-directories

Get an array of parent directories including itself

201 downloads a week

Repo of the Day

CircularProgress

Circular progress indicator for your macOS app

578 stars

How I Make an App

  1. Write down every idea. Most of them are boring or bad, and that’s fine. It takes a lot of bad ideas to get to the good ones
  2. Start with the idea, and learn what I need to make it
  3. Design the app myself, and build it with AI as my tireless pair programmer
  4. Ship it, and let reality decide. Some of my most popular apps are weekend projects, and some I spent months on went nowhere
  5. Read every support email and reply myself
  6. After every WWDC, go through all my apps to see how they can use the new features
    • But wait a year before trusting a brand-new API

Support My Work

If my apps or my open-source work are useful to you, you can sponsor me or donate, buy one of my paid apps, or leave a nice review on the App Store. These people and companies already support me. Thank you!

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