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 the database like queryable JSON or Gis fields, then you start hitting various hardware, network and operating system level constraints. 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 some stacking and scaling and ended up hitting the 41mph mark, in a smarter way we did, nobody seemed to remember how to download files, untar them etc, but when it became illegal but obviously not stopped. I even made a website is great because you have your website up and attempt to solve several common problems people have with linux. 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.