“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

O_o I wonder how many times I've spoken to someone and didn't realize who it was/how important they were because of the anonymity of the internet.

I know I've gotten into heated arguments on here or on Reddit with very well-known figures in the tech world without realizing who they are until after the fact. Luckily I don't think I've every argued with a developer about their own product before... that I know of.

i have a great solution: speak to everyone like they are a human being with feelings :)

* slow clap *

“A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” —Proverbs

When I was much younger I started building a ray casting engine. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around how to render the floors so ... I emailed Ken Silverman.

It escapes me now _why_ I emailed him. I certainly had no idea the gravity of who he was (for those also unaware, he is perhaps most famous for creating the Build engine used in games like Duke Nukem 3D). I believe I was under the false assumption at the time that the Build engine was a raycaster (I hadn't played Duke Nukem), and I probably found a personal page of his about the Build engine while trying to solve my problem.

Either way, young me emailed Ken Silverman like it was nothing. He responded! He corrected me about the Build engine, but also proceeded to help describe how to render floors in a raycasting engine.

It still took me awhile more to get the hang of the math, and I believe a few more emails back and forth with him. I feel bad now, knowing now who he was. But I appreciated his help immensely. I think I wrote 3 or 4 more ray casting and tracing engines back then. Some were rudimentary, one was a raycaster but allowed arbitrary 2D level geometry (and even used some tricks to put "holes" in walls to cheat windows and have multiple heights). One was for a code golf competition. And one was _super_ efficient; the math and levels were set up such that 90% of the logic was just binary math rather then having to do the usual multiplications, divisions, and square roots. They're a lot of fun to make and I learned a lot.

Ken, if you ever stumble on this comment, thank you!

When I was 19 I was interning at Google and I got into a mild discussion on a mailing list with Rob Pike. When I went back to school the next semester someone was teaching a class on UTF-8 and I thought the name of the creator sounded familiar.

Thank god I don't have access to those emails anymore so I don't have to endure the cringe.

To make myself feel better, I posit that that kind of youthful arrogance is at the origin of many innovations done by youngsters that didn't know better.

I've done nothing worth mentioning here, but I have received a couple emails asking detailed questions about things I'd done and forgotten about years ago or looking for early career advice, and I'm more surprised and honored that someone took the time to appreciate my work than anything.

That’s great. In your naïveté, you were unaware not intimidated by his prominent figure or reputation. I’ve found that some very well-known people and companies are more approachable than one might expect, possibly because people usually assume they will be indifferent to personal communication and don’t try to talk to them.

The best I've gotten are emails asking for permission to fork one of my public Github repos. I was never sure how to respond to those, because... yes? By default?

Reminds me of attending a conference and being in a workshop with a member of TC39, the Ecmascript standards committee. I was sitting next to this individual but didn't know who they were. I made the mistake of complaining about modern JS and version splitting. Fortunately, I didn't say anything too harsh but I definitely would have held my tongue if I knew who they were.

I wrote to Ken Thompson when I was an undergrad doing a history of computing essay. And he wrote back with a potted autobiography! It was probably a bit before email became the scourge that it is now.

The sad part is: I lost the email in a transition from one machine/set of floppy disk backups to another.

> Ken, if you ever stumble on this comment, thank you!

His email address takes a very short time to find and he's on Facebook. Just a suggestion: why not send a note and thank him for real? You might make his afternoon a little brighter.

(I'm awful about thank you notes and if you knew me you'd be within your rights to call me a hypocrite, but still!)