Once a Maintainer: Mike Dalessio - by Allison Pike

The first open source experience I had actually, it was Perl. I think it was Perl. And it was like a very early form of a wiki. So this is like, I don’t know, 1997, 1998 maybe. And we really had a need for team-level documentation at Bloomberg. So I just threw one together and hosted it on the server under my desk. Stop me if this sounds familiar at all, hosting internet sites on your desk computer. And then figuring out how to rsync it across our data centers, I was like, oh, well, now I have all this, you know, rsync capability. Maybe I should open source that. And so I actually sent a pull request back upstream. “Pull request” — I emailed the patch saying, you know, I built this stuff. It got merged and I was like, hey, that’s great. That was my first open source contribution. .