Today marks the day when we merged the commit authored by the 800th person in the curl project.

We turned 22 years ago this spring but it really wasn’t until 2010 when we switched to git when we started to properly keep track of every single author in the project. Since then we’ve seen a lot of new authors and a lot of new code.

The “explosion” is clearly visible in this graph generated with fresh data just this morning (while we were still just 799 authors). See how we’ve grown maybe 250 authors since 1 Jan 2018.

Author number 800 is named Nicolas Sterchele and he submitted an update of the TODO document. Appreciated!

As the graph above also shows, a majority of all authors only ever authored a single commit. If you did 10 commits in the curl project, you reach position #61 among all the committers while 100 commits takes you all the way up to position #13.

Become one!

If you too want to become one of the cool authors of curl, I fine starting point for that journey could be the Help Us document. If that’s not enough, you’re also welcome to contact me privately or maybe join the IRC channel for some socializing and “group mentoring”.

If we keep this up, we could reach a 1,000 authors in 2022…