15 years also for me, mostly lurking from a remote location in France, reading some discussions every single day and continuously learning new things. This community had so much impact on my professional life as a full stack software engineer!
I discovered the world around Ruby on Rails, then the modern JavaScript ecosystem (and CoffeeScript followed later by TypeScript), burned out, focused on Ruby, added Rust to my toolbox, wrote a small hobby operating system that had to have its own Lisp dialect of course. I was inspired to create so many side projects over the years, most of them open source, thanks to the influence of this community.
I also tried my hands at starting a startup obviously, multiple times, but I'm a solo dev and didn't succeed at finding a profitable niche for myself, instead I applied my knowledge to better understand the business and product sides of the startups I've been working for which made me a better engineer for sure.
This community almost made me move to the Silicon Valley, but instead I traveled the world as a digital nomad when everyone was doing it, and came back home to settle down in a forest close to my roots.
Reading you all daily I can imagine what could have been my life at the heart of the tech world, and at the same time I'm happy to read its pulse from afar.
I hope HN will still be here in 15 more years, thanks everyone!
Just wanted to say, I enjoyed reading about your story, wishing you well from all the way in California. This place is pretty great that it brings so many of us together from different backgrounds but share a love for tech, learning, and more.
I discovered the world around Ruby on Rails, then the modern JavaScript ecosystem (and CoffeeScript followed later by TypeScript), burned out, focused on Ruby, added Rust to my toolbox, wrote a small hobby operating system that had to have its own Lisp dialect of course. I was inspired to create so many side projects over the years, most of them open source, thanks to the influence of this community.
I also tried my hands at starting a startup obviously, multiple times, but I'm a solo dev and didn't succeed at finding a profitable niche for myself, instead I applied my knowledge to better understand the business and product sides of the startups I've been working for which made me a better engineer for sure.
This community almost made me move to the Silicon Valley, but instead I traveled the world as a digital nomad when everyone was doing it, and came back home to settle down in a forest close to my roots.
Reading you all daily I can imagine what could have been my life at the heart of the tech world, and at the same time I'm happy to read its pulse from afar.
I hope HN will still be here in 15 more years, thanks everyone!