I will be the oldest person on the bench for sure (almost 40... time flies!), and I'm nervous as hell. :)

I will second Kragen in saying that there surely are many others like me, that has been inspired by your work.

Oh and btw, it was the post on Automata, not ripgrep. This one https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/

There are probably dozens of people who have been similarly inspired by you, but aren't reading HN this morning.

...or are using your work without you or them knowing. E.g., just the other day I added the fst crate as a dependency to do longest prefix searches on a set of word/continuation pieces [1]. Similarly, we use fst in a word lemmatization tool that is used to lemmatize billions of tokens.

Thanks for the awesome crates!

[1] https://github.com/stickeritis/wordpieces/blob/7abbfb893ec20...