The author of the text discovered the Benthos project while browsing Reddit and was immediately intrigued by its lightweight stream processing framework. They Googled the project and fell in love with it, particularly its concise and entertaining documentation. The author met Ashley Jeffs, the primary author, at Kafka Summit London and decided to sponsor the project to integrate it into their own product, WarpStream. However, after Redpanda acquired Benthos, the author was surprised by the swift changes made to the project, including commercially licensing some integrations and rebranding the Discord community. The author chose to fork the project, maintaining it as a free, open-source MIT-licensed repository called Bento3, which will continue to carry on where Benthos left off.