Actually, not dream – I used to hope. No, not even – I used to wish (as in “wishful thinking”) that one day there would be hundreds of thousands of people using my code.

Some of my code shipped with Firefox forever ago so technically there are actually millions of people using my code. ISO Master and Asunder have been in every Linux distribution for over a decade. That’s a lot of people, which I also can’t get a count of.

But here’s something I can count: access requests for a web application on my own web server. It’s the APNG assembler, which I wrote forever and a day ago:

2007: 562 hits
2008: 11242 hits
2009: 15019 hits
2010: 2083 hits
2011: 2286 hits
2012: 18750 hits
2013: 30402 hits
2014: 41305 hits
2015: 60573 hits
2016: 105883 hits
2017: 56712 hits

Yeah, that’s over a hundred thousand animated PNGs created by my dinky little web server last year alone. I guess my wish turned into a dream which turned into reality. Cool.

And now I’m bored. I can’t make myself learn another programming language – I feel it’s too trivial, uninteresting, and without lasting impact. I can’t think of another worthwhile open source project to start or take over because I know what it takes to make one succeed and I’m just not excited enough about it.

What’s left then? New challenges. I’ve got to try something I haven’t done before. And that list of things is growing ever shorter. Perhaps I will try to learn to be nice to people. That would be monumental for me :)