While idly scanning Slashdot one day I saw a software project by the creators of Nullsoft. It was a peer to peer file sharing application that did not use a central server. Closed-source, but some binaries had escaped before AOL shut Nullsoft down.
I quickly joined efforts and helped reverse engineer what of the protocol hadn't been discovered yet. In the process I wrote the first available UN*X client, gnut, which I maintained and extended greatly over the following several months. The development was run as an open-source project, with many contributors all improving and debugging the codebase.
Through this experience I learned much about UNIX programming, socket and network programming, reliability in the face of hostile peers, network theory, and a great deal of project management to keep all the contributors happy.
In the end summer came and I lost my high speed internet connection, so I passed gnut development on to Robert Munafo. The last version I was responsible for is gnut-0.3.28.tar.gz . Bewarned that there are known bugs in this version. http://www.gnutelliums.com/linux_unix/gnut/ is the current web-page for this piece of software.
