I watched Freshmeat, religiously, for updates to GTK, WindowMaker, and WMPrefs. I don't even know why I built each release other than because I could and because I was learning so much.

I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I learned so much during this time which has been extremely useful for my occupation today.

It was a neat time to live in, for sure.