Honestly, this could be referring to most open-source projects. I’d imagine many of the popular ones were originally made to solve a problem for themselves and then everyone jumps onboard with that solution.

Linux itself also kinda fits here considering it was meant to just sort of be a small project in the beginning and I doubt Linus ever could have predicted what it became.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 88 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I have a tiny php library for a somewhat popular framework. It was made so a company could protect a very old database and certain tables. It started as a one off 9 years ago. It was one php file of less than 50 lines.

As of this month it has been downloaded 2 million times. I still can't believe its been used this much. And I'm the only maintainer. If I wanted to I could ruin a lot of peoples days. But I won't.

In a couple of decades, we are going to have large swaths of code that will outlive its creators being used on essential infrastructure.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Which one?

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Laravel.

[–] wibble@reddthat.com 3 points 2 weeks ago

Whelp.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

"most" is a bit strong. Many open source projects never get users or any kind of traction, they're just a passion project for the author. The lucky few fill a need and take off. Review the package usage count on npm or the GitHub stars for projects - there's a tiny fraction that make it big.

[–] mech@feddit.org 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Considering that making it big just means a lot of responsibility, angry messages, AI-driven bug reports and still no pay, I wouldn't call them lucky.

[–] stephen01king@piefed.zip 5 points 2 weeks ago

I would, sarcastically.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago

To be fair, you can also somewhat steer whether it will take off as a dev, by how you promote it and how much time you take to make it easily usable by others. Many devs really don't care to have their passion projects take off, because it means you'll likely spend less time doing your passion thing, more time doing user support.

[–] HellieSkellie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 95 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

one morning my wife and I were talking about Penis Pumps. Then I left for work, got annoyed with managing how many different AWS account credentials I had to manage in my dev-box terminal, and wrote a script to manage it for me.

I named my script PPump because lmao. My team lead saw me use it one day, logged into my dev-box and took the script and published it to our internal GitLab without knowing why I named it PPump.

Now one year later our entire office has PPump baked into the default devbox image. Every day people penis pump into their AWS accounts. They have no idea and I can't ever say anything about it.

Anyway this meme speaks to me in primordial ways.

[–] zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 71 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Probably the original xkcd of this.

[–] Jayjader@jlai.lu 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

That's such a great riff on the original xkcd

Do you remember where you found it?

[–] zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Pretty sure lemmy a few months back.

Edit: went to search my upvotes, only a month back.

https://lemmy.ca/post/55566100

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

only a month back.

2025 has been a long decade

[–] zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 weeks ago

It’s felt like a decade every year since the before times.

[–] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know what the source is, but I remember seeing the "AI" bit first, and then a bit later people started editing it more and more, escalating things. I'd check sites like knowyourmeme if I wasn't lazy right now.

[–] stephen01king@piefed.zip 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What's the thing at the very bottom?

[–] SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 2 weeks ago

Shark biting an undersea cable

[–] Flipper@feddit.org 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Libxml would fit the description. In every browser and system and the maintainer just stepped down.

[–] mech@feddit.org 12 points 2 weeks ago

...and two others have stepped up before he actually quit.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/214fb814223614d13d44f1465302c3cbd7d1395a
https://hackaday.com/2025/12/23/libxml2-narrowly-avoids-becoming-unmaintained/

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Literally every hack ever

[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

POC is actually just short for Production (that) Occasionally Crashes

[–] velindora@lemmy.cafe 9 points 2 weeks ago

Anyone’s dependencies because they are too lazy to learn to code basic things