opensource

Fun OSS encounter story: 15 years ago, the WebSocket spec just came out and preliminary implementations were live. I wanted to prototype a little in-browser MMO, but the one implementation out there was node.websocket.js by an Argentinian fella named Guillermo Rauch.

Guillermo's library was only half-working for what I needed, so I ended up forking it and rewriting it entirely (https://github.com/shazow/node.websocket.js). I suggested some of the changes upstream, we discussed over email. I built my demo using my fork, while Guillermo also did a rewrite that became socket.io which was fantastic! So good that I didn't feel the need to keep working on my fork.

It's funny to think that there's an alternate universe where I went on to build the urllib3 of nodejs websockets.

It wasn't until yesterday that I realized: That Guillermo is the same @rauchg who went on to create /nextjs and founded @vercel. I didn't stand a chance! 🙇