For quite some time now, I celebrate and welcome every new commit author in the curl project in the public. Recently, that means I send out a toot on Mastodon saying Welcome so and so as curl commit author number XYZ and a link to their initial curl work. (example 1, example 2).

This messaging is not done automatically. GitHub helps out by specifically mentioning in a PR when it is done by a first-timer to the repository, and I have a convenient local script that tells me how many authors we have so far, and then I type up the message myself and send it. (Sometimes I miss one, which I regret.)

This process takes me about seven point five seconds per case of manual labor. Writing an automated script to do this correctly, triggered for the right persons, would take the equivalent of many years of new authors.

For the last few months, people have more and more noticed and replied mentions about the fact that we were approaching commit author number 1337. Lots of people have said things in the style of “I should learn to program soon so that I can become number 1337”.

The number 1337, is of course just a number. I find it amusing and charming that it seems to have this almost magic aura and attraction to so many people in our community.

Today, commit author 1337 was finally announced, only three years since we announced author 1000. There are no permanent records or anything of this fact other than this blog post. Further, there is a risk that we have a duplicate or two somewhere in there so that a recount at a later time will end up differently.

Commit author 1337 became Michael Schuster who wrote this pull request, which fixed a minor build issue in the mbedTLS backend code. Thanks!

337 new authors over the last three years equals roughly two new commit authors per week on average. Pretty good. We have room for many more!

A relevant statistic in this context is also that 65% of all commit authors only ever authored a single commit.

Now, let’s go for author two thousand next…