Autonomy, Mastery, and bug 313989

Dear diary: About a week ago, I took out a full 10 minutes from my day job to watch an interesting video on YouTube about what motivates people, as recommended by David Carver.

The video explains what might motivate people (who typically hold a challenging and rewarding day job) to contribute their efforts, for free, to open source projects, and it really got me thinking (spoiler alert -- go watch it first): The video concentrates on three significant drivers for motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and a Sense of Purpose. I considered this is terms of my WTP interests:

• "Autonomy" is right on target: Nobody told me to get involved with web tooling in Eclipse, this is purely an itch. For a free-time contributor, I believed I scratched my itch really good.
• "Mastery" is on target too, since nothing teaches you a spec(*) as well as trying to implement it, or filing a bug against said implementation. It's nerdy, but rewarding!
• "A Sense of Purpose" is a bit more difficult... What is the purpose of contributing to an open source project, anyway? Is it ... mastery for the sake of professional/career development? ... just "scratching an itch"? ... to improve the quality of a common resource? ... to earn the respect of my peers? ... to make the lives of users (other developers) easier? I'm not sure I have a clear answer on this one, but it got me thinking.
  

I wouldn't have taken as much notice if my watching this video didn't coincide with the WTP 3.2 RC2 build, which I took for a spin, and found three really annoying defects (bug 313989 being the most trivial of those). These bugs weren't really enough to warrant PMC reviews and all that process, but to me, they felt just like when you notice the first scratch on the paint of your brand new car: Sure, you realise it's probably going to get worse -- but you would have preferred not to know about it.

The point is this: I should have found those bugs earlier! If I hadn't been so busy investigating all kinds of other unrelated, non-WTP stuff (issues in Xalan and Hibernate, besides investigating how face recognition works, just because...) I could have done much better! Boom, there goes my sense of purpose, no matter how I look at it: Lost in unfocused dabbling.

So my conclusion was this: The "sense of purpose" motivating me to work with WTP is to develop the best IDE for working with XML schemas and documents, and to make our XPath2 implementation consumable for the likely adopters.
My open source effort will be concentrated on that (WTP+XML) for the next two years: Make it to the New and Noteworthy. So while I might take other tools for a spin (Xtext rocks!), those other projects shouldn't wait up for patches from me -- for the next two years.

P.S. And dear diary: I promise to write more often.

*: XML, XML Schema 1.0, SOAP 1.1, XML Catalog, XPath 2.0, XSLT 1 & 2, XML Schema 1.1, the list goes on.