“Developing a new application, you’re faced with hundreds of micro-decisions. How do we make these decisions? If it’s something we recognize as being important, we might ask. The rest, we guess. All that guessing builds up a kind of debt in our applications — an interconnected web of assumptions. As a developer, I hate this. The knowledge of all these small-scale timebombs in the applications I write adds to my stress.

Open Source developers, scratching their own itches, don’t suffer this. Because they are their own users, they know the correct answers to 90% of the decisions they have to make. I think this is one of the reasons folks come home after a hard day of coding and then work on open source: It’s relaxing.