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Comment by mitchellh | Hacker News Reader

We've gone full circle! I originally launched Vagrant here on HN in 2010, which was at the top of HN very briefly for the day. Now here I am 14 years later witnessing my departure post in that very same spot. A strange experience! Thanks for the support over the years. A lot of the initial community for the projects I helped start came from here.

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Just the Link. It all started here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

Vagrant: A tool for building and distributing virtual development environments (vagrantup.com) 129 points by mitchellh on March 8, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments

I still remember reading that post on HN. And subsequently Vagrant took off. Cant believe it is nearly 14 years! Thank You Mitchell for everything as I am (still) using Vagrant. First Child is always going to be a hectic job beyond comprehension. Hopefully you will have more free time to play with Zig and may be even Crystal once your child grows a little more. Best of Luck.

Edit: I guess HN momentarily went down due to this announcement on front page.

Is there somewhere a list of these big stuff that launched in the HN, eg this and Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 .

Another big one on top of my head is Coinbase

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664

PagerDuty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653

This is great to read now and reflect on where they eventually went in the next 13 years. The basic questions "why Chef" and "why Virtual Box" and so on with requests to support other hypervisors and provisioning tools. Now Packer and Terraform provision and deploy machines to damn near any platform using damn near any provisioning tool, but neither Mitchell himself nor the HashiCorp team in general had to learn all of those tools and platforms. Instead, they provided orchestration systems that allow for a common configuration language and execution model but delegate the logic of how to use the APIs of specific platforms and provisioners to plugins. Seed the ecosystem with plugins representing the most common platforms and toolchains your company is already familiar with and extend from there to stuff you either figure out later or let the community contribute.

This feels like open source and community creation at its best. It's why GNU/Linux systems did what they did. A bunch of professors and hackers tried to clean-room recreate Unix but never finished the kernel. Meanwhile, some grad student made a kernel but no userspace. Then some entirely different teams put these together along with a package manager, installer, and remote filesystems users could fetch ISOs and packages from, and finally you've got a usable system that didn't require a beast the size of Microsoft to do everything in-house. None of them could have done it alone.

It also makes the events of the past year kind of poignant. I see a lot of commenters talking about HashiCorp needing the license change to capture the value of what they created and not allow other companies to siphon it off. But isn't that the point of civilization? We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We generally don't want the first person to come up with an idea and their direct descendants to be the only people who ever profit off of that idea. That's aristocracy. Mitchell is a billionaire, isn't he? None of Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, or Ian Murdoch ever became billionaires, but they weren't exactly starving in the street, either. Exactly how much value does a single person need to capture? It's the community we want to see thrive, isn't it? Not just our single company. Every employee of that company can work elsewhere if they need to and every investor has other investments. They aren't going to starve either if the company someday stops growing.

I get not wanting the Amazons and Googles of the world to take open source inputs and put them into proprietary sinkholes where further innovation gets stuck inside of a single company. But isn't that the point of the GPL? Anything they add they also have to give back. You don't need BUSL for that.

Congrats on what you've accomplished here. Building an industry-standard company and then carefully planning your exit on your own terms is a huge win.

I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker adjacent, bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of us. Best of luck to you!

> I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker adjacent, bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of us. Best of luck to you!

You should check out the terminal he's been working on codenamed Ghostty [0].

[0]: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

Note: Ghostty is still a private project. I plan to open source it one day and share it with more people but for now this is a private personal project. If you are really interested in helping with the project, please feel free to email me, but no promises!

I remember getting my first commit into Packer, you review, approved and merged it. It was one of the best days of my (fairly early) coding life because I think your work is amazing and I was so happy to contribute something back.

Thanks for all the amazing work thus far!

You're one of the very few technical people that made it big that I continue to look up to. Congratulations on your achievements, and looking forward to whatever is in the pipeline.

Congrats on all your accomplishments Mitchell and looking forward to what you'll create next.

Well deserved Mitchel! Thank you for Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Vault and Terraform, all of which I used back in my DevOps days.

I remember hacking on the same Ruby projects as you, then running into you the same way in the Erlang world. Man, that was almost 15 years ago! You’ve built some awesome stuff along the way… congrats, and keep hackin’!!

Congratulations on a new page in your journey! And thank you for documenting the story - you’ve inspired many great developers and founders along the way!

Being on almost the opposite end of the software design, I haven’t yet had a good place to apply the tools you’ve built, but I’ve heard many nice things about them from practically everyone, including direct competitors. That says it all.

Congrats! You've Terraformed the industry!

I built a career following in your vision. Thank you 1000x

Thanks for everything! I can't wait to see what you'll do next!

You and Armon have truly shaped the world of infrastructure with your tools and ideas. Although we never met in person (I only had the pleasure to meet Armon so far) - we've interacted a couple of times through some PRs and I really like you as an engineer. It's incredible the value that you created over these 11 years - not only on the product side of things (Terraform and Vault are incredible!), but also with all of your Go packages. The amount of time your name pops up in my go.mod files is just impressive :)

You and Armon are incredible engineers and I'm so happy you built something as cool as Hashicorp! All the best with the next chapter of your life!

I once (March 2014) emailed hashicorp to retrieve a lost vagrant licence key. I got a direct reply from you Mitchell with instructions on what to do. Blew my tiny mind, those were rare bygone days in our industry.

Thank you for all you've created.

In 1992 I replied to an email from Steve Jobs that was shipped in the default email client of the NeXT workstation I was using. I checked the 'read receipt' box in the client. He replied, ignoring my question and berating me for violating his privacy by using the read receipt feature.

> He replied, ignoring my question and berating me for violating his privacy by using the read receipt feature.

Sounds totally legit!

My first major foss was heavily based around Vagrant (PuPHPet). It was a joy building on top of your tooling to make web engineers lives easier.

Thank you for your work, it was great while it lasted!

Some of my first OSS work was also based on Vagrant (https://github.com/ezekg/tj). I eventually turned that into a commercial desktop app, built on top of that CLI project. Ultimately, the project didn't work out, but it was a big step in my open source and entrepreneurial journey.

ty, mitchellh!

PuPHPet was very useful, I started many projects with it.

I actually still have some projects with a Vagrant VM based on it that I have to move to docker compose or something.

Big fan of your products (Vagrant, Terraform, Vault, Consul). Thank you for the amazing contributions to the community. Best wishes.

I remember meeting you at a DC Ruby conference after a talk you gave on middleware as a design concept. This was years ago, in the early days of Vagrant I think. Amazing to see how much you’ve accomplished since then. Congrats on your achievements and best of luck with your future hacking!

Thank you for all the great products that you have created! Your vision on infrastructure has always been inspiring to me and you are one of the few engineers who has truly moved the field as a whole forward.

Congratulations Mitchell! You’ve inspired and influenced the careers of many, many developers, including me.

I always look to HashiCorp first when searching for tooling. Always something interesting coming out of that shop.

Incredible run! Thanks for all the tools you’ve given us. But more importantly all the relentless passion for automation has been very inspiring! Chapeau, sir! All the best in whats next for you.

Back to hacking Neopets?

-Iridium

Good luck! Consul, Terraform and Nomad were pivotal for my carrier. Went from a server unboxer to a container wizard during the last decade. Thanks a lot!

Good luck and thanks for everything! It is very hard to make such a big impact on millions of developers and companies around the world like you did.

Just want to say thank you, from a engineer who in 2010 kickstarted a career by using vagrant to create reproducible dev environments.

Followed your work since that launch - thanks for everything! Enjoy your family and find some new fun things to explore.

Congratulations, Mitchell!

Many accomplishments and the ability to change an entire industry. One of a kind!

Can't wait to see what else you get up to.

Congrats Mitchell! Thanks for all your great work, and best of luck for what's ahead.

Man you're a rocket ship. Such an inspiration and congratulations on your success.

Congratulations! I was an early Vagrant user, it helped immensely, thank you!

I've been using Vagrant for ~10 years, on a daily basis!

Thank you, @mitchellh !

Thanks! You made quite an impact establishing all those projects.

Congrats Mitchell, you've been a huge inspiration!

Just wanna say thank you for all your hard work!

Thank you for all your hard work, man!

I would like to thank you for the amazing products, especially Consul, Nomad, Vagrant, Vault and Terraform, which I started to promote in my company to improve their tech stack.

But at the same time I don't really like some of the features are guarded behind paywalls...like Vault/Consul namespaces or multimaster deployment...and the price for those useful features are nefariously hostile for startups like us.

let's go flying

Now you get to work on your terminal fulltime now ;)

Congrats!

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