I met my best friend in an online open-source game that was pretty popular at the time (so far as foss games go). We were both into making games of our own and got talking because of that

He taught me the bits of programming I found particularly challenging, and we generally just chatted a lot and shared and played what we were making or came across online. He’s now a full-time game developer at a tiny company (so he does everything from coding to sysadmin to customer support) and I’m doing IT security consultancy where customer contact and an understanding of how networks and systems run is also core to the job. Kind of surprising how close they are, but also different enough that I’m sometimes surprised what he doesn’t know about security (not things he should have known necessarily, but still) and conversely I find the insights about game development still very interesting. Multiplayer lag hiding, as a random example. We’re a super good match. He lives about a day driving away so we see each other every few winter/summer holiday seasons since I was ~17, at which time we met up for the first time at the only LAN party ever organised for this game (where I had the honor of making the website and meeting all these friends I hitherto only chatted with, still probably the best weekend of my life). He lives in like the most beautiful mountainous region that never gets old to this flatlander. I’m so lucky to have a friend like this, never judging, always available, understands me exactly