I was just rereading this and thought of some more interesting context: This was the KDE project. Harri got in and first wrote ... a modem dialer. Non-trivia

I was just rereading this and thought of some more interesting context: This was the KDE project. Harri got in and first wrote ... a modem dialer. Non-trivial, but not exactly mind blowing. A couple years later and much learned, as HTML / JS support was being added, he wrote the JS engine. I came in and wrote a crappy little flash card application since I was learning German at the time, then an MP3 tagger. The tagger went on to become a full-fledged music jukebox, and I rewrote the ID3v2 and meta-data layer to become TagLib, which has now become more or less the standard ID3v2 implementation (used by most OSS software, Last.fm and a handful of proprietary apps). In both cases we started small, bumped up our skills and then wrote something with some staying power. When people have done hard projects, it's easy to think it's because they were just born that way, but most of the time, they just kept learning, kept getting better, and eventually had some significant hacker mojo.