Exactly. All the time while I was studying I've lamented about contributing to open source, especially to the kernel. I've read tons of things, code, os books.

Exactly. All the time while I was studying I've lamented about contributing to open source, especially to the kernel. I've read tons of things, code, os books. I think I've teached myself a pretty good understanding of how it all works (never taking a os course at the university, majored in math). Not a single patch came out of it over the course of almost 10 years (taking the time into account I dabbled around in Linux in high school). Then the massive linux graphics stack rewrite broke my laptop. I've had no clue. Zero. Nada. But I've tried to fix it and actually succeeded somewhat. Then I've noticed that other stuff isn't working anymore in the new graphics stack (it was an old machine and devs were busy porting the newer chip generations). So I've started with more serious stuff. In retrospection, re-reading old mails and patches my lack of clue about the code, process and people is hilarious. But pretty soon some fools started to use my XVideo implementation (despite all the bugs) and reported problems. And I just wanted to get my laptop back into a working order with the cool new linux graphics stack. I've had a reason to ship and users that bugged me. So I've shipped. Now, two years later I'm a major contributor (even managed to once get a top 20 position by patches for a kernel release due to a major cleanup). In a specific area (Intel graphics memory manager) all patches are either reviewed by me or written by me.