My tale is a little bit different. I wrote an open-source library for a popular service in a popular programming language. I wrote a couple of e-mails and sudd

My tale is a little bit different. I wrote an open-source library for a popular service in a popular programming language. I wrote a couple of e-mails and suddenly my library became popular. Today it has had about 50 different people work on everything from off-by-ones to upgrading to the next language version. This library has been a reason to employ me, so the monetary benefits are there. I don't expect somebody to pay for something that I put out for free, I don't expect anybody to help me make that something better either. However, the time I've put into this project is worth a thousand times less to me than the standing and respect I gained, and the people I got to interact with so far.