I just realized that while I had an introduction thread on the old Aura forum years ago, apparently I never made one here. I will rectify that now that the forum is finally back up^^ My real name is Dennis, though I very much prefer exec, I'm almost 31 by this point (oh dear...), and I'm from Germany.
I started coding websites when I was a teenager and slowly worked my way up as a programmer, ending up as a freelance web developer. I was fascinated by private servers and server emulators ever since I started playing Ragnarok on eAthena servers, setting up my own customized servers for friends, and eventually my programming knowledge caught up and I began hacking around in the emulators I was using, before finally starting a server emulation project of my own in 2012.
Since that time I've poured a large portion of my time into the development of server emulators and tools surrounding the games I worked on, from Mabi and Aura, over TOS and Melia, to other yet unreleased projects. I'm a big believer in open-source and try to release as much as possible to the public even if it's not perfect yet, because you never know what will happen, and even a hacked together project can serve as research or a starting point for someone else, should you not finish it. While overcoming the fear of releasing my imperfect creations into the wild wasn't easy in the beginning, I think it actually made me a better programmer, making me think more about what I throw together.
I've been told that I can be a little intimidating or difficult to work with, due to my direct way of talking, my supposed perfectionism, and my straight-to-the-point way of criticizing pull requests, but know that I don't mean to sound annoyed or rejecting^^" I try my best to appear more approchable nowadays, and it would be unfortunate if this quirk turned you off from contributing to one of my projects. I've also heard that it helped some people to learn that I'm an INTP.
Well, that's all I have to say about myself, if you want to know anything else, you can ask right here.
Since you mentioned it, I'd like to say that I personally really like how you do criticize pull requests. I know I'm not the best coder ever and there have been a few times where it did take awhile to get my pull request all fixed up to be ready to be added to the master, but it keeps everything in the master unified and keeps the code clean and I have found the criticisms in said pull requests to be very helpful. Although I wouldn't be surprised if the constant formatting errors I used to have in my code was annoying.
Oh woow, not sure I even introduced myself in the old forums, but here it goes. Name's Bruno, 24yo, Portuguese, trying to get a degree in Informatics and Computer Engineering.
Started programming back when I was 15yo, fell in love with it. Also love tinkering with hardware. Really like building tools and little bits of software to ease more monotonous and time consuming tasks (like say generate scripts for all the Pet Whistles in Mabinogi, or even writing hunting quests for Mabinogi's mobs).
As for Exec's criticism, I find it helped me grow as a programmer, by knowing what I'm doing wrong or could do better, understanding what a client could complain or request and so on. Not to mention, keeping the codebase clean and unified makes for an easier experience when attempting to understand the existing systems.