The original poster also said one word that rang some big alarm bells in my head: architect. So, he's written a small pile of OSS from the ground up, which whi

The original poster also said one word that rang some big alarm bells in my head: architect. So, he's written a small pile of OSS from the ground up, which while certainly not worthless, isn't anywhere near as impressive as somebody who fixes bugs and contributes valuable patches to existing projects. Anybody can write a program from scratch to do X. It takes programming skill, to be sure, but it's much easier to start with a clean slate. Adding functionality to an existing codebase is much, much harder, and requires exactly the sort of skills required to be a truly excellent programmer. Not only do you need to understand the complexities of the existing system, but you need to work with other people, and write code that doesn't stomp all over other parts of the system.