[Jsbsim-users] Developer and project appreciation

[Tom L. <t.l...@gm...>]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to use my days off to write some appreciative words because
developers don't always get them so here it goes:

*JSBSim is THE reason I became interested in programming*

*My true passion has always been aviation.*
At school, years back, I always struggled with programming because I had no
application for it whatsoever. Grades were mediocre at best, motivation was
lacking and I didn't see myself doing any of this for longer than
absolutely necessary.

Somehow I wanted to know how computers simulate flight in flight simulators
though and so I ended up glancing over JSBSim's source code.
That was the day I seriously couldn't get my eyes off source code for the
first time. Quite surreal for me back then, really. Something that was the
bane of my school life was so interesting to me that I got lost reading for
hours.

Everything was spot on. Documentation, examples, structured and clean
source code, good naming. I had never seen, that software could be that
organized and structured, developed in cooperation, with a moral code (free
software and its ideals) - it was most impressive to me.
That was the first time I grasped what software engineering was about. How
code is more than just a copy pasted calculator for the most basic things.

After that I read into things, grades improved a lot, motivation never
lacked again.
Fast forward 7-8 ish years and I've been a software engineer for the last 4
years at a global software company - a position I would have never imagined
myself in just a couple years prior, contributing little bits and pieces to
open source projects. And very happy.

---

So to everyone that contributes or has contributed to JSBSim:

   - Thank you for your time and commitment
   - Thank you for showing me a passion I never knew I had
   - Thank you for the professional, detailed work of love that JSBSim
   obviously is
   - Your work can be incredibly inspiring to people, whether you realize
   it or not

I hope I can give back in the future once my personal life calms down, for
the time being I just wanted to tell you how much you changed my life with
a library about flight dynamics of all things - thank you.

Greetings from Germany

Tom