My parents gave me my first computer when I was 14 years old. I played a lot of Unreal Tournament at the time. At some point I heard about this thing called Linux that actually played UT better than Windows. So my dad drove me to Circuit City and I bought a box full of CDs that was Redhat Linux 8. What followed was weeks of running a nearly inoperable computer as I formatted and re-formatted the disk every time I ran into some issue I couldn’t fix - which was a lot.

Eventually I figured it out and I’ve been using Linux and my daily driver ever since. I did get into programming, but mostly for the web. I even made a website about Unreal Tournament which is a hilarious time capsule.

That all said, I always looked up to and admired the (in my mind) godlike developers that wrote the software I used every day. Gnome, KDE, the kernel, Tiling WMs, Firefox… these were the realms of the programmers I looked up to the most. I’ve always had a latent desire to contribute myself, but never really got comfortable with the tech to do so.

Until today! I managed to land a small PR in cosmic-files - what I would consider to be “major” open source software. Or soon to be.

Anyway, I hope this is just the beginning.