[General Topics] Leoisright:
Well, where to begin. I actually have 3 developers I'm thankful for. Myn, Virus, and of course TommyTomatoe. So to choose 1, I pick myn .

This started about a year and a half ago (possibly longer) when I started to really try to learn Android coding. It seemed like I was way over my head but really wanted to learn as much as possible. It took being mentored by 3 fantastic Devs in order to bring me up to speed on not only how android worked at it's core, but the modding needed to bring various mods to life. Quicksettings, Unlocked Hotspot, 4-1 reboot options, beats audio mods, camera hacks, zipalignment, then of course Open Source.

Myn has been a critical mentor in my development. He may not necessarily know how much so but he truly was. If it weren't for his Warm Series of roms, I may not even have wanted to dive in to the developement arena. Once I knew that's what i wanted to do, here comes Virus. He was still young at being a developer at this time but talked with me and showed me the ins and outs of decompiling apks, smali edits, building roms, to build.prop edits, ext4, framework modifications and so much more. He even offered many times to call so we could go over some of this. At this time, I didn't even know what ADB was nor how it worked.

After quickly picking up the knowledge, I reached out to Myn and offered to become a beta tester and quickly entered the world of porting and modding framework and apps. Soon after is when I became friends with TommyTomatoe. Together we created some special things for android in which I will get in to in a little bit.

I remember when Myn got sick one time and was taking some time off building his roms, I offered to step in and take pure RUU updates and deodex them (thanks Football for the links), proceeded to modify the 4-1 bootmenu, add hotspot unlocks, implemented beats audio, camera mods, quicksettings mods, and more to help keep his series up to date. During that time is when Tommy and I became pretty good friends.

After feeling like I've learned so much with a sense based ROM, I figured there was no better time to learn AOSP. Thanks to preludedrew and Evervolv, Tommy and I got to work branching off their github to create our own. That's when Classicnerd came to light. Not only did I not understand Java, but there was no knowledge of how the apps and jars were put together, what files changed specific settings or how to create a kernel during compile. Boy was there a lot to learn.

After purchasing a HP Touchpad, I used Cyanogenmod GB release to modify the rom. I started a thread in the touchpad forums and sooner then later had over 1 million views with reaching 2k downloads per day. towards the end, it was being downloaded 20k per week. WOW. Thanks to the generous members, they decided to sponsor Classicnerd with enough touchpads and a very nice compiling computer to bring ICS to life. Of course, it wasn't an easy task. Thanks to CM for helping with the device tree, and Preludedrew for spending countless hours helping me get it working correctly, Tommy and I soon launched our own github for ICS supporting 4 devices. HP Touchpad, OG Evo, Evo LTE, and the Kindle FIre (didn't work that great).

Thanks to a few developers helping, we were able to bring HD Video aboard, I fixed the sound glitch to have the first ICS Touchpad with working screen off audio (later fixed the correct way by JCSullins, to finally bringing Flash video on board. Now we are working at bringing JB to the device.

The entire time, Myn, Tommy, and Virus have helped teach a noob member in to a recognized developer with almost 6k thanks. Working mainly from source code now, they have given me the tools and confidence to work on kernels, source code, smali, creating custom meta-inf, to now mentoring others to give back.

Even if this isn't considered a winning story, I just want to give thanks to some people.

Myn, Virus, Tommy, Preludedrew, Misfit, Chubbzlou, Sac23, TMartin, Joelz, Cyanogenmod, JCSullins, ewalk, Jean Baptist, the entire group of donators that brought touchpads in our hands, XDA, the forum mods, MindSplit, Jzen, and so many more. THANK YOU for believing in me, for helping me understand and become a developer. To help me understand the ecosystem as great as android, I will forever be in you debt.

Thanks,

~Leoisright