MvcMailer makes me happy as a developer.
I find an immense amount of happiness everytime I check the Nuget page of MvcMailer. It’s so refreshing to see the download count going up (42,427 total downloads as I write), receiving feedback, praises and even the complains.
The idea of MvcMailer came from trying to bring some of the amazing Ruby on Rails ActionMailer features to ASP.NET MVC developers. It was well accepted since the very beginning and I hope is still helping people. As a side-effect, MvcMailer gives me an opportunity to keep in touch with the developments in ASP.NET MVC, C#, the .NET framework and the community around these. During our Sunday coffee and code seessions, I usually pair up with Tyler Mercier, and MvcMailer is often the project we’d work on, or at least talk about. It also gives me a code to share on my github profile, which I expect a good future employer to care about :)
Yesterday, we met for Coffee and Code and released a new version to better work with .NET 4.5. This has been the most requested feature in the last couple months and required a small code change. After we released it, I drove home in about 20 minutes. Checked the counts, and it had already seen 4 downloads. This felt just amazing. Now after about 20 hours, it feels even better to see 100+ downloads of the new release. It feels so good.
Open source is truly rewarding, both to its contributors and to its consumers.
Happy open sourcing.