I've spent a long time asking myself why open source matters so much to me, why I keep coming back to it. I once joined a company purely because they promised I could do open source full-time (it didn't turn out well). Before that, I was doing open source inside and outside of regular jobs. And now, in the age of LLMs, when the value of code itself seems to be declining, I'm still here, still doing this.

Recently it clicked. I do open source because it's social work—in the sense that it lets me participate in society.

Everyone wants to belong to some community, to connect with others. But I was never good at the usual ways of doing that. Social activities that came naturally to others were difficult for me. In school, I had few friends. After class, I'd stay home assembling Lego or reading books alone. Then I discovered coding.

Coding was a wonderful hobby for me, especially because I encountered it at the dawn of the internet era. The first programming languages I properly learned were Perl, PHP, and JavaScript—all languages of the internet age. The synergy was something else.

Gradually I fell into the world of open source. And there, even someone like me—awkward at conventional social interaction—could be social. My code helped people. I could collaborate by exchanging code. I could have conversations, mediated by code. IRC, mailing lists, forums—these became my social media. Over time, “the group I wanted recognition from” became the people in the open source world. I didn't care much about being recognized by classmates, but I wanted to be recognized by these people I'd never met face to face.

That mindset still shapes me now, approaching forty. I still care more about recognition from open source programmers than from colleagues. The social activity that happens in open source communities is, after my family, the most important social activity in my life.

The specific things I build, the technical details—those matter less than I used to think. I just want to do the kind of social activity that suits me, and open source happens to be the way I do it.

That's all, really.