According to the German Wikipedia YaCy turned 10 this year. On December 15th 2003 Michael Christen publicly mentioned his idea of a peer-to-peer base search engine in the comments of a news article published at heise.de, a German IT news website, for the first time.
When I learned about YaCy a few months later, it was still in it’s very humble beginnings. I think there already was a website, but there was no version control for the source code, no forum, and only a small community of 2 or 3 developers. The crawler was not yet finished and indexing was done via the proxy which is still included today. I still remember how excited I was when my index contained the first 1000 documents and how disappointed I was when I lost them because Michael changed the database format once again (Solr was still far, far away). 😉
During the last 10 years I have been laughed at (this has not happened for along time) and yelled at (only once at 26c3), but most of the time I had lots of fun learning and getting to know quite a few funny, interesting, and inspiring people. I visited places and events I would not have attended if it was not for YaCy and I got a nice certificate. 🙂
Even though I have never been the most active contributor, I hope that YaCy will stay a part of my life for at least another 10 years.