(Originally posted to LINE’s internal mailing list, and then to Twitter)

Today’s the last day of my 5-year career at LINE. It was a truly unique experience for me to build Armeria and Central Dogma. They were my first open source projects started by company initiative yet evolved into something greater. Armeria, which released 1.0 very recently, has now ever-expanding range of external customers, from individuals to enterprises like Slack and Afterpay. In reality, it is rare for a company-run open source project to gain popularity and trust from the community, especially when we’re not FAANG. This difficulty usually stems from 1) the lack of transparent decision making process and prompt feed back loop that involve external users and 2) the amount of time and effort required. We gained trust from the external users by 1) showing the most transparency we can have — we didn’t even have an internal version of Armeria — and 2) patiently pushing the project forward for the last 5 years, as some of you witnessed.​

I’d like to appreciate everyone who was involved in this journey; 1) my teammates and managements who supported this idea with strong belief and 2) the internal users who bravely adopted Armeria and Central Dogma and worked closely with us to make them better and better. I hope it was fun and rewarding experience for you like I felt so. I’d like to apologize for and learn from any mistakes I’ve made if it wasn’t. Please feel free to reach me via LINE or good old e-mail.​

So, what’s next? I think it’s your turn!​

Do you have something to open-source in your mind? Dream big and go ahead. Make yourself a better engineer by practicing best engineering principles and communication skills in a world-wide community. Use what you’ve learned from them for yourself, your project and your organization. It’ll look like an insignificant journey in the beginning, but keep in mind that the best moment in an open source project is left for those who don’t give up, like the quote “It ain’t over till it’s over.” You’ll be mesmerized by every milestone of your project — the first external user, first 100 stars, first pull request and so on — that will make you realize your journey was never insignificant but truly epic — something that transformed yourself into a greater being.​

So, should I say good-bye now? I don’t think so and you know why.