Comment by vinc

15 years also for me, mostly lurking from a remote location in France, reading some discussions every single day and continuously learning new things. This community had so much impact on my professional life as a full stack software engineer!

I discovered the world around Ruby on Rails, then the modern JavaScript ecosystem (and CoffeeScript followed later by TypeScript), burned out, focused on Ruby, added Rust to my toolbox, wrote a small hobby operating system that had to have its own Lisp dialect of course. I was inspired to create so many side projects over the years, most of them open source, thanks to the influence of this community.

I also tried my hands at starting a startup obviously, multiple times, but I'm a solo dev and didn't succeed at finding a profitable niche for myself, instead I applied my knowledge to better understand the business and product sides of the startups I've been working for which made me a better engineer for sure.

This community almost made me move to the Silicon Valley, but instead I traveled the world as a digital nomad when everyone was doing it, and came back home to settle down in a forest close to my roots.

Reading you all daily I can imagine what could have been my life at the heart of the tech world, and at the same time I'm happy to read its pulse from afar.

I hope HN will still be here in 15 more years, thanks everyone!