On a flight back from Redmond last week, I finally read Linus Torvalds’ 2002 memoir “Just For Fun.” I really enjoyed its picture of Linux (and Torvalds) early in its success, with different chapters varyingly swooning that Linux had 12 or 25 million users. But more than that, I enjoyed some of the “behind the scenes” of a world-famous project that started out small before growing out-of-control.
Twenty years ago, I released the first builds of Fiddler, an app I’d begun as a side project while working on the clipart feature team in Microsoft Office. Originally, the idea was to build a debugger for the client/server communications between the Office client applications and the clipart download website. To put it mildly, the project was much more successful than I would’ve ever hoped (or believed) back then. More than anything else, Fiddler was a learning experience for me — when I started, I knew neither HTTP nor C#, so setting out to build a Web Debugger in .NET was quite an ambitious undertaking.
By the time I’d finished officially working on the project, Fiddler and its related projects amounted to perhaps 40000 of lines of code. But that’s misleading– over the years, I probably wrote at least five times as many, constantly rewriting and refactoring as I learned more (and as the .NET Framework grew more powerful over the twelve years Fiddler was under my control). I learned a huge amount while building Fiddler, mostly by making mistakes and then learning from them.