Every post on this site is built by people I’ve never met, with tools that cost nothing: Jekyll turns text into pages, VS Code makes editing feel nice, Git remembers everything, and GitHub Pages hosts the result for free.
We say “thank you” to software about as often as we say it to our chairs. So here it is, out loud: thank you. The people who maintain open-source projects in their spare time are the quiet infrastructure of almost everything I’ve built.
The cheerful takeaway: this career is generously rich. A curious beginner with a laptop and a Saturday afternoon can ship a real website to the whole planet, at no cost, using the same tools that professionals use.
If your stack made you smile recently, consider sending a kind word to a maintainer this week. It costs nothing either, and it lands well.