I will tell you the history of LIBRSB. What started almost as a joke, grew into a reusable fruit of my PhD experience and my longest-running professional project. LIBRSB served as laboratory for my experimentation, maturing at once into both a cookbook and at times, a pot of code smells. A journey between PhD goals and non-goals, chasing chimerae and best practices, driven by a passion for free software at the service of science. I will describe the context around LIBRSB and share some valuable lessons learnt.Orthogonal to the goals of the talk, but fundamental to know: LIBRSB is a 100KLOC-heavy HPC library for shared memory-parallel sparse matrix computations. It works in most of the programming languages for numerical computing.