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'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.
Being a prolific developer doesn'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).
Also, famous developers tend to own/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's usually not enough to be known in the community.
Also, where you live makes a difference. Your odds are much better if you live in Silicon Valley. I know a developer who created/maintains about 5 projects each with 2000+ GitHub stars and he is still not well known because he doesn't benefit from network effects like devs who are living in the US.
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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'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.
Being a prolific developer doesn'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).
Also, famous developers tend to own/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's usually not enough to be known in the community.
Also, where you live makes a difference. Your odds are much better if you live in Silicon Valley. I know a developer who created/maintains about 5 projects each with 2000+ GitHub stars and he is still not well known because he doesn't benefit from network effects like devs who are living in the US.