Today, I got this email in my inbox. I had already hit delete skimming it, but it caught my attention at the last moment:

Paul,

Do not be surprised, You haven’t interacted with me directly recently but I’d like to thank you for your contributions and hard work for all these years to openswan. Was just browsing through old mailing lists so here this is.

Thanks,
Elison

And it made me smile. I know my efforts are appreciated, but I don’t get much feedback about it. it is far more common for someone to ask repeated questions (and not googling first), and then vanish without telling me whether or not they got it working.Though from experiences in the past, I’ve found they usually did get it working, but I only find out the next time they have a question.

It reminds me of Ben Laurie’s .sig,

“There is no limit to what one can achieve if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”.

(Ironically, I don’t know if Ben is the author or just the distributor of that quote, which somehow makes the quote even better)