It's funny. It really took me committing something to some open project to realize that all those programmers out there are actually all people like me.
When I first committed something to an OSS project, I got an amazing response full of gratitude and warmth. For me, this took a lot of anxiety out of the whole experience! Since then, I have contributed several small things to several projects. That is the way it should be!
Funny enough, my first commit to an OSS project felt very similar to my first post to a message board, my first post to a foreign message board, my first post to Hacker News, hell, in some ways even to all those first awkward sentences you exchange with any human being!
Which just proves that the Internet as a whole is actually just a bunch of people. And most of the active contributors are really nice, too!