In the early 2000s I wrote a Java webapp framework called Maverick that had a brief moment of popularity (even getting community ports to PHP and .Net). In 2003 some unknown guy emailed me and asked if he could use Maverick as the framework for a book he was writing. I said sure - but he wanted me to make a lot of changes, and at the time I was focused on app development and didn't want to invest a lot more time doing open source work. So he ended up building his own framework from scratch.
The guy's name was Rod Johnson, the book was Expert One-on-One J2EE, and the framework it launched was Spring.
In the late 80s', as a teenager, I received an offer from a doctor about improving a program that I had written. I turned down the offer. I wondered what would have happened if I picked it up instead.
In the early 90s', on a whim, for my first vacations as professional, I decided to go to NY. I stayed in a mostly derelict building in Harlem. There I met my future wife.
You're welcome. It still blows my mind that if I had taken ring 'West' instead of ring 'East' that my whole life would have turned out entirely different.
I had the flu when I took my SATs which likely caused me to not become a national merit finalist, which led to me taking the school I liked better over my second choice (which gave a full scholarship to NM finalists), and it is literally impossible for me to imagine the trajectory of my life had I gone there.
> The whole thing was constructed as the location for an animated feature film to be shot in 35 mm, with special gantries to move the cameras around. The problem: the circus orchestra had to be animated in time with the music.
The guy's name was Rod Johnson, the book was Expert One-on-One J2EE, and the framework it launched was Spring.