I’d say ego is less than 10%, and the quiet, achieving minority are not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or love for the community, they are doing it because it’s a love of their craft.
Once you see something that you have built, running at thousands of operations a second for years, once it’s running smoothly and all the bugs and edge cases have been smoothed out. Watching the machine dance, visualising the data structures in your mind - and algorithms running on them. Thinking about state changes, loops and execution, and watching it all running in a beautiful symphony of logic : there’s really no other feeling of joy and appreciation of beauty. I love being a programmer, and I suspect the majority of open source contributors are like this.
The snide comments and unhelpful github messages are the minority in my experience, especially with more mature products (kernel development, sys ops tools etc)
Once you see something that you have built, running at thousands of operations a second for years, once it’s running smoothly and all the bugs and edge cases have been smoothed out. Watching the machine dance, visualising the data structures in your mind - and algorithms running on them. Thinking about state changes, loops and execution, and watching it all running in a beautiful symphony of logic : there’s really no other feeling of joy and appreciation of beauty. I love being a programmer, and I suspect the majority of open source contributors are like this.
The snide comments and unhelpful github messages are the minority in my experience, especially with more mature products (kernel development, sys ops tools etc)