I had a really similar experience. As a bored teenager in the late 90s, I would sometimes log into the Yahoo chat rooms using the computers at my high school. T

I had a really similar experience. As a bored teenager in the late 90s, I would sometimes log into the Yahoo chat rooms using the computers at my high school. The chat client was a Java applet, and it was atrociously slow and prone to crashing. I had started teaching myself to program a few years earlier, so creating a chat client seemed like a fun project. There was a guy that hung out in the Programming:1 chat room with the chat handle was 127001 (he was able to create that handle before Yahoo became more strict with the chat handles one could create) that had reverse-engineered the protocol and posted a guide online. I wonder what happened to him. Thanks, loopy! Anyway, I created a Yahoo chat client in Win32/C as I was learning the API and the language. I was the only user for quite a while, but eventually I posted it using the free web space EarthLink gave me for being a dial-up subscriber. It got pretty popular through word of mouth. Later, when I installed Linux for the first time, I took that code and turned it into an ncurses-based client. It was a lot of fun, and somehow I ended up turning the fun I had hacking on little projects like that into a living.