Hello! I'm Amish (also known as hydrabolt), and I am the creator of discord.js.
I created discord.js as a hobby/learning project for myself in August 2015 while I was still a teenager in school.
More than 6 years later, discord.js has become more popular than I could ever imagine, and I cannot express how grateful I am to the other contributors and the community for this amazing experience.
A few of my favourite highlights include:
- The countless voice rewrites (I think we're done with that now 😉)
- The April Fools' traditions
- Having users tell me that they learned how to program just so they could use discord.js to make a Discord bot
- The moment when discord.js first hit 1,000 stars and 1,000,000 downloads
- The many light bulb moments I had along on the way after days of confusion (especially with voice-related features)
- When friends and coworkers tell me that they've used discord.js before - it helps me to remember that discord.js isn't just a small hobby project anymore
After these 6+ years, I'm deciding to take the decision to step down as owner of the project. Instead, I'll be transferring ownership to Crawl, who's been an active maintainer of the project for quite a while now.
As a TL;DR, I feel like I've learned what I wanted to during my time working on discord.js. I've been working on and off with the Discord API for over 6 years now, and after a while you start to feel like you want a change of scenery.
My motivation throughout the entire project came from wanting to learn something new. In the first few years of the project, I was busy with learning JavaScript, Node.js, design patterns, API design, etc.
After a while, I started to feel more comfortable with this and ready for something new. I dabbled with making the custom JSDoc generator and website (which have since been upgraded by other contributors), and then I moved mainly to working on features relating to the Voice API.
I found the Voice API quite interesting and so I focussed on that. I worked on creating prism-media to make it easier to work with audio/media files in Node.js.
It took me quite a few attempts to finally convince myself I was comfortable with the Voice API (there was a running joke that every new discord.js version came with a new voice rewrite). This summer, I worked on my final rewrite of voice - @discordjs/voice. I'm very happy with its status and to see just how quickly it is being adopted by the community, and I finally feel like I've achieved what I wanted to when making a voice library.
This brings us to the present day, and I'm at a point where I finally feel comfortable that I've done all I wanted to do with discord.js.
Not really. Crawl and the other maintainers have been effectively managing the project for quite some time now, so transferring ownership to him is more of a formality than anything else.
I will still stick around in the discord.js community and won't be disappearing anywhere!
In the fear of forgetting someone (you come across a lot of people in 6 years), I'm not going to thank any specific people here, but thank you to everyone who has been involved with the project. An extra special thanks to those that helped to look after and grow discord.js 💝
I'm currently working full-time as a software engineer on a placement year, but next year I'll be returning to university to finish the final year of my degree. I'm not too sure what comes after that, but I'm excited for it and I'm also grateful to discord.js for giving me a solid foundation to start my career.
If you're more concerned about the immediate future, in 3 weeks time I will be streaming Red (Taylor's Version), and you should too 😊
If you want to keep in touch, I'll still be around in the discord.js server, and my GitHub is @amishshah if you want to have a look at what I'm working on.
Thank you for the 6 years!
good luck soldier!