"It was originally just me. I’ve never logged my dives, because I didn’t see the point. Some people do it for the numbers, others do it because they want to do things by the book (literally), and some people seem to just collect the dive shop stamps. For me, the paper logbook just didn’t make sense.

At the same time, I’m a huge believer in dive computers. The first piece of scuba equipment I bought was a Suunto Gekko, because while I’m fine renting everything else (I’m apparently very regular sized, and I’ve never had issues with mask fitting etc either), I also think it’s stupid to do dive tables when a dive computer can just do so much better.

So I had my dives logged on the computer, but the Gekko would only remember profiles for about 20 dives or so. So I did want to download, but the Suunto downloader only worked on Windows, which I don’t have, and didn’t work for the Gekko anyway. I looked into a few projects, but they really didn’t work at all.

And then we had problems with kernel.org, and for a couple of weeks there was basically nothing kernel-related for me to do until the infrastructure was cleared up, and I started writing something to save an electronic log-book. It actually started with just parsing some XML that I had from a Suunto export that Dirk had done for me—I think I had given him my Gekko because I had upgraded to a Vyper Air, and he had saved the dives I had on it using the Suunto app and exported them as xml, so I had some data that I wanted to look at."

https://divelog.blue/linus_torvalds.html

I think it was around that time that the kernel.org servers were compromised so perhaps that's it.