The catalyst wasn't the whole reason
I was dating a woman named Kimberly, a huge Star Trek fan. I host basically the entire Star Trek catalog — every series, every film — on my own Jellyfin server. She bought a Fire Stick so she could watch from her own place. Turned out it was one of the new Vega OS models, which has no way to sideload or run a Jellyfin client at all.
I already had other hardware that could run Jellyfin fine. I went out and bought a Vega device anyway, specifically so I'd have real hardware to debug against instead of guessing in a simulator.
That was the spark, but honestly not the whole reason. Once I saw how big the actual gap was — a whole new generation of Fire TV hardware with zero Jellyfin support — I wanted to fix it regardless. I like having my own media on any device I own, and I like sharing it: my roommates watch off my collection, and I host my mom's entire cowboy movie collection on there too, because she's an older lady who has a hard time reading DVD covers. Now she can just scroll and pick something.
"Once I saw how big the gap was, I wanted to fix it regardless of how things turned out."
Two weeks, nights and weekends, built against undocumented Vega OS APIs.