Disclaimer: These are my personal views and do not represent any organization or professional advice.


#tech #life

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:08:36 +0200

What Drew Me To Software Development And Open Source

Though I have a love-hate relationship with computers (and technology generally), it's always been something I've had an affinity with. My mother tells me that at the age of three and before being able to read, I was surfing the internet unsupervised on her personal computer.

I remember the first day of school where the teacher asked the class "How many of you have a computer at home?" and "How many of you have internet at home?" A third of the class had a computer and a third of those with a computer had dial up internet.

Most classrooms had five or six computers lined up against a wall and computer usage was an extra on top of the regular curriculum. It wasn't long before we were bypassing the school's internet restrictions and downloading music, watching videos and playing flash games.

The Nintendo DS was released and my brother and I proceeded to use flash-carts to run homebrew (music players, video players, emulators), rom-hacks, cheats and otherwise inaccessible games. I have fond memories of school trips where everyone chatted over "pictochat" 0 and played many games through DS download play 1.

Then, the iPod Touch came out and it too became something to mess around and tinker with. We promptly jailbroke 2 ours and installed themes, tweaks, emulators, games and other software. We became hooked on the Legend of Zelda MMORPG clone, "Graal Online Classic" 3. I became a moderator of this MMO and created pixel artwork for it (under the pseudonym "Bam") which still exists in the game to this day.

My primary school learning of this jailbreaking expertise from my teacher had me jailbreak the entire stack of new iPads they bought for use in the classroom. I won't mention what they wanted them jailbroken for.

As we got older our interests shifted to computers and our parents bought us secondhand and sluggish thinkpad laptops. We played, modded and tinkered with countless games and emulators and were particularly fond of Minecraft and Counterstrike. Most games didn't run well, but it didn't matter to us.

This was also the era where (at the age of 10) we would jump on "Chat Roulette", talk to strangers and see things we probably shouldn't. Facebook still had an innocence to it and the feed actually contained a chronological listing of friend's posts rather than an algorithmic soup of advertising nonsense. I spent too much time on forums and made a lot of friends, no one knowing my age, location or identity, or me, theirs.

When my brother and I turned 14 and 15 respectively, we nagged our parents to allow us to build our own computers. Each given a budget of $600, we planned, bought parts and then constructed our first computers. It was difficult to try and squeeze as much performance as possible out of our constrained budget. The specifications were as follows: AMD FX 6300 CPU, 4GB memory and an NVIDIA 650 TI or Radeon HD 7950. Over the years we upgraded these computers and they ran for nearly a decade.

Valve was working on porting Steam to Linux and ran a promotion in the game Team Fortress 2 to entice players to try the game on Linux. For a few weeks, anyone who launched the game on Linux received a cosmetic "Tux the penguin" item. 4 I installed Linux Mint and collected the item through many Steam accounts (betting on future tradeability which never materialized).

From here onwards I ran Linux on my computer and never went back to Windows. Trying various Ubuntu flavours, I finally settled on Arch Linux which I used for many years. Initially, my time was spent tinkering and customizing my desktop. I explored everything, from tiling window managers to modal text editors and through Linux, another world opened up to me.

I began programming and found it insanely difficult in the beginning. Unable to wrap my head around it, I have memories of starting the "Learn Python" tutorial, struggling to understand it, getting frustrated and finally giving up. It was as though programming and I were incompatible. It was only later through writing shell-script that everything finally clicked and I began to program with ease.

I created simple websites and learned the ins and outs of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I began writing small programs in bash shell-script and Python. Around 2015, I wrote my first "major" software program "Neofetch" which became wildly popular. One program led to another and eventually I had created dozens and dozens of projects in many languages, all Open Source.

Programming became a labour of love and it never got old seeing my ideas come to life on the screen. It also became an addiction and something I spent far too much time doing. Though shell-scripting is my forte, privately, I have written more C than anything else and consider myself equally proficient in both.

Everything I created and ended up publishing I gave away for free with a permissive license (MIT). I couldn't bring myself to turn my projects into products, restrict their usage or charge a fee. I couldn't create projects in order to make money and for these reasons, I never worked in the industry.

When I entered my twenties, my interests shifted to minimalism and living with little reliance on technology, my later projects all sharing this philosophy. I've come to see technology as a means to an end rather than the end itself and limit its presence in my life.

As a first solution to my burn out, I had plans to release a video game in an engine of my creation. The idea was that I would work at my own pace and without the stress and burden of my open source projects. After tens of thousands of lines of code, many rewrites and more burn out, I scrapped the idea and stopped programming for a time. In hindsight, this game project was a lousy solution to the problem.

Today, even though I don't program much, it's still a love of mine and every now and then, I tinker. At a snail's pace I am privately working on my own POSIX shell which I plan to extend with optional extras that make writing complex programs in it realistic.

I think I'll always be a programmer.

—Dylan Araps

Footnotes

  1. Pictochat enabled wireless communication between all DS devices in close proximity to one another.
  2. DS download play allowed one person with Mario Kart DS for example, to create a multiplayer game and wirelessly play with up to seven other players who didn't have the game.
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch#User-made_modifications
  4. https://home.graalonline.com/
  5. https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Tux