Top developers can have a life outside coding

Just having an "active" profile can be achieved by cloning a few repos and writing a few feature requests.

You'd have to read the contents of their history of course, code and communication.

Seeing how they reason about code in issue discussions or pull requests is valuable, even more so than reading the actual code.

You make a good point about negative preconceptions from seeing someone's code. I suppose it's better (or at least no worse) than the negative opinion we may form from seeing someone's grades or previous employer.

On the contrary. On those jobs the developer will be a milk cow, plus under constant pressure and stress.

My experience is that people who stay until 9 writing code because they're "passionate" write a lot of code and implement a lot of features for a while, but the quality of the code is low because they're always tired when writing it. And after a year or so, a combination of burnout and the unmaintainability of their code forces them to quit, leaving the next group of programmers with something truly horrible.

If that's your definition of "top developer" you can have all of them.

IMHO, a top developer is someone who can produce a quality product from inception to completion, which requires being well-rested, taking care of their own needs, and having enough social life to be able to make their code decisions in their social context (because every program runs in a social context).

"Who can afford to keep coding after an 8-hour work day of coding? Who doesn't get harassed in the open-source community? 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to "buy" more free time (i.e: nannies, cleaners, good healthcare, a car to commute, etc.)."

I'd be led to believe that anyone contributing code, esp significant amount, to open-source projects after their day job is: white, male, upper-middle class, has no family, has no love for any family they have, and/or has no life after code. Whereas, I've read enough write-ups from OSS contributors to know they come in all kinds of personal circumstances. Plenty are quite committed to their families with OSS project of choice a hobby or passion. Women and non-whites stay a minority in tech and science in general but still significant contributions from them.

I disregarded the harassment claim entirely, despite plausibility, after reading a line that slanders and misrepresents all kinds of contributors to push author's political beliefs that basically hate races and genders dominant in American and European software. I mean, if the writer regularly posts this stuff, then it's perfectly reasonable for others on projects to throw vitriole back to get the person to stop doing it or just leave.

re the actual advice. The stuff below that are all good recommendations. Especially limiting oneself to certain number of hours on a specific project. I'd further say limit yourself to one project at a time. Also, it can help to limit time spent on things like Hacker News, Youtube, gaming. Things that are addictive and can take up more time than you expect. Put a hard limit on how long you'll spend on anything like that. Think about the limit itself, too.

So, evidence is vastly in favor of a more moderate approach to developing software in one's free time. Even for a person who practically lives on a computer. The brain needs novel experiences and breaks from things. Just works better that way as connecting new dots is the basis for creativity. Gotta feed it more dots. :)