It wasn't a planned thing. I had recently got injured playing football, so I was stuck at home, not being able to walk or drive. I started checking the #mono IRC channel (it was 2003 and internet was something you did over a 48k modem, when your home phone line was not needed). Some guys, lead by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Gnome, were implementing a compiler of C# and a bytecode interpreter of .NET IL, and I was very curious about it. I kept downloading, compiling and trying things out.
Then one day Miguel wrote in the channel that it would be nice to have some graphical editor and that somebody could perhaps port SharpDevelop over to Linux, by replacing Windows.Forms by calls to GTK. I said that I'd give it a shot and... well, 10 days later we had a working editor and half a dozen of contributors.
