Porting the ElectricSheep AfterEffects Plugin from Windows to OSX was my true first open source contribution (1999?). And that only happened because my friend was friends with its author and it came up when he was showing off some fractals movies. Then I said, “Oh I can help you with that.”

That OSS plugin itself was riding on the OSS ElectricSheep. All collaboration and distribution was via tarballs, although is on GitHub now. It was a trip seeing some code I wrangled make its way into commercial media, just organically.

The ElectricSheep project weaves so many cool tech threads together. Only thing is was missing compared to modernity is decentralized genome propagation.

Scott Draves, its author, has some great artist content too. He also spearheaded Polyglot notebooks, early on in that kind of interface.

I think the depth (in time, and community involvement) is one of the things that has drawn me to this project. It has the excellent vibe of a dedicated and yet accessible, IMO because of the beautiful and widely available visual output, internet community.

Thanks for sharing some of this rich history!