I started working with BuddyPress by accident. In February 2009, I responded to a tweet from my friend Matt Gold asking for help with a CSS issue on a site he was working on. That site was the still-in-beta CUNY Academic Commons, running on the still-in-beta BuddyPress. Within a few weeks, I was doing paid work for Matt’s project, working with BP (and WP, and web software in general) for the first time. And BuddyPress 1.0 came out just a few weeks after that.

Over the last five years, BuddyPress has taken over my professional life. I began by writing BP plugins. I started to contribute to BP itself through support and patches. I became a member and eventually a lead on the core team. My consultation work involves BuddyPress almost exclusively; this success (in terms of both money and impact) emboldened me to drop out of graduate school. People know me as “the BuddyPress guy”. When you type “boone gorges” into Google, it suggests “boone gorges buddypress”.

I feel very grateful to have stumbled into the project when I did. It aligns with many of my philosophical and political positions: the primacy of people over content, the importance of data ownership and free software, the fight against parasitic software vendors in public institutions. I’ve met some good friends through my association with BP. I’ve leveraged my expertise into a fun and comfortable career.

But the fact remains that it’s all been a fluke. When I realized it’s been five whole years, I couldn’t shake the thought: WTF. How strange to devote such a large part of one’s life to something that was such an accident. [Something something destiny something something forks in the road something.] I got lucky because I happened to stumble into something that was a particularly good fit for me. But I also took many leaps of faith along the way: agreeing to work on the CUNY Academic Commons when I had pretty much no idea what I was doing, submitting my first patches to BP, quitting my job, upping my rates, donating huge amounts of time to the free project instead of doing paid client work. I’m glad I had the guts to make each of these leaps.

Happy birthday to BuddyPress, and happy anniversary to me. Here’s to many more happy accidents!