Between 2001 and 2005, I had the privilege and honour of leading and guiding Gentoo Linux's development teams.
That was a period of high growth for Gentoo -- our userbase went from less than a thousand users (about ~750 in the #gentoo IRC channel), to over 1.5 million by 2003. This massive mushrooming of the userbase made its effects felt throughout the project.
Due to the nature of the technology and the ethos of the project, Gentoo rapidly started to become the Linux distribution for every kind of situation.
Several projects launched within Gentoo -- many of them around supporting different hardware, including: PPC, Sparc, IA64, Arm, and others. Communities formed to help people speaking specific languages (Spanish, French, and Polish were amongst the pioneer communities).
Each group had developers within the project, and users interacting with those developers. Interactions (user-user, dev-dev, user-dev) happened in many fora: IRC, email lists, Gentoo Forums, as well as a number of third party online destinations for Linux geeks.
Gentoo-fever was all around. We got made fun of: in forums comments everywhere, satirical websites popped up, and of course, our users were die-hard defenders of The Gentoo Way.
The challenge of guiding this growth, and considering the perspectives of (at our peak) 250 developers, fell onto the leadership team. As part of that team, I underwent my own growth -- as a developer, a colleague, a friend, and a human being.
I would like to tell you my story.