“Sladkey recalls the first time he found and sent a bug to Linus: "My first contribution was in porting some program, probably one of my smaller personal projects. I discovered a bug. Since Linux came with source, my first inclination as a hacker was to take a look under the hood and see if I could fix the problem. I found that although I had never done any kernel work, that I was able to navigate around the code pretty easily and provide a small patch to correct the problem. "With my heart beating and my palms sweating, I composed the most professional message I could muster and sent it off to linus.torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi describing the bug and including my proposed fix. Minutes
later he replied something like, 'Yup, that's a bug. Nice investigation. Thanks. Fixed,' and I was hooked.”