Right when the series of blog posts that Russ published – or I guess they’re articles; I don’t know what the technical term is… But right when those writings came out about vgo, they had that section about the download protocol, which at the time – it looks pretty much the same now. It’s like six HTTP endpoints that are at the core of it; or maybe it’s five… Something like that; a low number. And basically, anyone can build that, just like you were saying, Carmen; it’s this abstraction layer, and you can put whatever you want behind it.

I wrote a Buffalo app - shout-out to Mark, who’s not here today - that basically implemented that, and it stored the modules in memory after it went and grabbed them up from GitHub, or wherever. If you did a go get against the then Athens proxy, it would in the background go and do its own go get, back up to GitHub or wherever, it would get the module down and then store it in the in-memory database. Then the next time you did a go get, it would serve that module directly out of memory. That was a toy, pretty much, but I showed it to a couple folks - Marwan mentioned Carolyn van Slyck - and I showed it to Erik St. Martin and Brian Ketelsen, and… If I forgot anyone, I really apologize, but I think that’s almost everybody. And they were totally into it too, so we decided to work together.

[ ] We created a new GitHub org to host this code in, and the code - I called it “vgo prox”, like vgo proxy, which was totally lame… So Brian went to one of those startup name generators, because naming is hard… [laughter] I think the name that came out was like “Athens-Brass”, so we went with the Greek theme and just called it Athens. That’s how it ended up where it is.

Then Brian did a couple talks on it, I did a couple small things like meetups, and people just kind of at first trickled in, and then… I wouldn’t say we’re really having a massive surge of people, but it’s more than the trickle now. It’s gained some steam. Obviously, we have amazing contributors now, maintainers like Marwan, and we’ve got a bunch of others. I think there’s like six core maintainers. There’s gotta be 15 or 20 official contributors in the GitHub org now, and there’s tons of other folks too, who’ll come in and they’ll ask a question, or they’ll fix the docs, or they’ll fix a bug, or whatever…

I guess just a shameless plug for the community again is like – we consider anyone who comes to say hi even, or more, I just personally like to think of them as like they’re part of the community of Athens. If they come in and they say hi, that’s just as good as coming in and fixing a bug… Because they’re in, they’re part of it, and if they wanna go and do more over there, we’re there to help them do more.

I went a little bit off on a tangent about community again there, but… I hope that paints a little bit of a history there.