My first time presenting at a tech conference was at the XFree86 Technical Conference in November 2001—a difficult time to be traveling in the US. I spoke about XCB, which we created as a replacement for libX11, commonly known as Xlib. I was 17 and nervous as hell; my advisor almost took over giving the presentation, exchanging email with my parents the day before about how much trouble I was having. But I got up there in front of an audience of X Window System experts to tell them how I was trying to replace a key part of their software. I tried to be very diplomatic: Xlib is useful but it has some issues, that sort of thing. And from the front row of the audience pipes up Jim Gettys, the original author of libX11, interrupting my talk to tell me, "Oh no, Xlib is much worse than that." I had no idea what to do with that kind of support but I'll never forget it. I remember later he told me, "I wrote Xlib in three days and it hasn't gotten any better since." It was a couple years after that, at another conference, when he pointed out to me that I was born within a month of X.