This is part of a series on Open Source Builders. For a list of other articles in this series, check out the introductory post.

Do you have aspirations to be the next YouTube or Twitch star? If so, odds are pretty good you’re going to want Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for capturing video and live streaming your Counter-Strike talents.

In this you wouldn’t be too different from Hugh “Jim” Bailey, the creator of OBS. But in Bailey’s case, he has no ambition to be a YouTube star. Although he loves playing video games, his inspiration for creating OBS wasn’t fame. Instead, he had the simple need to capture part of his gaming screen on StarCraft so as to gain a bigger view of the minimap that displays enemy activity. A few hundred lines of code and a post to the StarCraft subreddit later, and “it just kind of spiraled into this crazy, super popular program,” Bailey says.

In a recent interview, Bailey claims the impetus to all this was that he was bored and there were no free tool options, but he’s being humble. His experience can tell us a great deal about how the most successful open source projects function.

Blame It on StarCraft

A coder from the age of eight, Bailey has no formal training in software development — no college and, except for one brief stint at the age of 18 (1999), no work experience.

“I never really had a real job in my life,” he says. Not that he hasn’t had interest, including from Twitch. “The fact that I had never worked with anyone before showed, and I failed that interview really bad,” he says. And he’s had at least one seven-figure offer for OBS, which he declined because he felt it wouldn’t have been good for OBS users.

Of his pre-OBS life, Bailey describes himself as a complete bum who was living with his dad. He also happened to be an excellent developer who built game engines for fun, with a particular need to “cheat” at StarCraft. He says that back then people were streaming their gameplay — specifically StarCraft — on the internet.

“When I was playing StarCraft, I dabbled with capture technology because — and this is going to sound stupid — in StarCraft you have this little thing called a minimap, and it shows you where your enemies are,” he explains. “I made this program that would capture the minimap and make it really big on my left screen, because I wanted to be able to spot if there was anybody incoming, making the game a little bit easier.”

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