I learned a lot, but I wish I could have gutted it out for longer in order to learn more about emacs and gcc internals. (I knew "we" were doing some maintenance on gcc because I remember asking questions about a comment that said "this is a win" and asking rms if we were working on gnu chess and him telling me that it was a compiler optimization. [Yeah, that's how amazingly skilled I was at the time.])

I ended up doing 4 sessions totaling about 10 hours and when I told him I was quitting, I was apologetic that I felt like I'd wasted his time quitting so soon after starting. His response I can remember to this day and it was something like "Don't worry about it; most people quit after the first session. You helped me out and we'll make sure you get your check."