Daniel Pink wrote that the things that motivate people are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the 3 golden pillars of open-source and it highlights what we believe to be the strongest motivation for people to contribute. I add the extra theme: It’s all about reputation and building one.

This provides you with purpose, you’re making a difference in the world and people are noticing you. It takes time to plan out the tools that you want to work on (autonomy) and in order to do so – you will need to stretch your skills and learn how to write production-level code (mastery) that thousands of quants will use every day (reputation).