> A blog, datepicker, and meetup events are trivial to me. They're like the freebies you'd expect in a party favor bag. It sounds more like he doesn't want to work hard, just hang out and talk, make a few small things, and somehow expects that to translate to survival.

You're grossly underestimating the work that was put into open source, writing and running events. I worked 60-80+ hours per week throughout my entire twenties. 20-25 was largely given to coding open source, speaking and running events...all for free.

> This guy might have more potential if he's managed to reproduce and have a spouse. Or there might be some critical flaw there that's blocking his ability to work at Google, and he's stuck without much opportunity.

You're missing the point here. I've had an abundance of opportunities, but decided against working at these large tech companies. I'm from the Midwest was insistent on doing everything the hard way...consulting and giving as much of the time I could to open source, blogging and speaking for free.

Ultimately this article was just meant to be a brain dump of some things I wrestled with along the way. Right now I run a company which sells education, so I've changed my tune in that free is not always doing better for humanity. Arguably I'm making even more of an impact now and also being paid for it...