I think that prolific devs are the ones who joined a particular community early and were able to ride the wave of success as that particular community grew. They often don&#x27;t have a day job - Either they have enough savings that they dont need to work or they struggle on a daily basis to make ends meet... Or they are fortunate enough that their employer allows them to work on OSS during office hours.<p>Being a prolific developer doesn&#x27;t have as much to do with talent as people might think - Developers become well known by blogging, speaking at multiple conferences or just being in the right place at the right time (whilst making lots of open source contributions).<p>Also, famous developers tend to own&#x2F;maintain many (often several hundreds) of different open source projects instead of focusing their energy on just one project. There are rare exceptions like Solomon Hykes of Docker - But if you just made one popular open source project, then that&#x27;s usually not enough to be known in the community.<p>Also, where you live makes a difference. Your odds are much better if you live in Silicon Valley. I know a developer who created&#x2F;maintains about 5 projects each with 2000+ GitHub stars and he is still not well known because he doesn&#x27;t benefit from network effects like devs who are living in the US.