Way back when, I had a little trouble installing Qtile on Ubuntu 10.10 or so, so I wrote up a little guide on how to do it. I think that became part of the official docs somewhere along the way? But anyway, I didn’t think much about it.
I went to PyCon in Santa Clara with a coworker who was being a little full of himself that morning. We were standing in the swag line and idly chatting with people around us. The guy in front of me was saying something, stopped to look at my name tag, and did a double take. “Whoa, you’re that kstrauser? Who wrote the Qtile guide? Wow, thank you so much!” He shook my hand, then we got our swag and went different ways. I don’t recall anyone else ever mentioning it to me, but from my coworker’s POV, we’d talked to about 10 people in a conference of 3,000 and one of them knew of me, so clearly I must be quietly famous or something. He stopped being a know-it-all, at least for the morning.
So thanks, Qtile. You gave me 20 seconds of fame while standing in line once.
Oh my god, that was me! I can't believe I just read this on HN. Whenever I'm at a conference (usually PyCon or DjangoCon) and meet someone whose work has benefited me, I try to make a point to thank them.
I ended up getting involved with Qtile for a few years and contributed to the docs, website, and various widgets.
Haha, I promise you I am not! I can't prove it was me, but I did find some old tweets where I shared that blog post in 2011. At one of the Santa Clara PyCon's I ran a small Qtile BoF in the Open Spaces and ended up meeting one or two people I had only interacted with on IRC. It was a pretty great experience over all.
I'm also kinda mind blown that a 15-second interaction I had at PyCon 13 or 14 years ago got a mention on HN. I only saw this post because someone at my local hackerspace told me that Qtile was on the HN frontpage. (I'm the resident Python champion and have shown off my Qtile setup at our monthly Linux night before.)
I went to PyCon in Santa Clara with a coworker who was being a little full of himself that morning. We were standing in the swag line and idly chatting with people around us. The guy in front of me was saying something, stopped to look at my name tag, and did a double take. “Whoa, you’re that kstrauser? Who wrote the Qtile guide? Wow, thank you so much!” He shook my hand, then we got our swag and went different ways. I don’t recall anyone else ever mentioning it to me, but from my coworker’s POV, we’d talked to about 10 people in a conference of 3,000 and one of them knew of me, so clearly I must be quietly famous or something. He stopped being a know-it-all, at least for the morning.
So thanks, Qtile. You gave me 20 seconds of fame while standing in line once.