As another youngster (17 years to be exact) who was (Might I still add, "is") worried about both the college aspects of things and the job aspect.

Your post gave me assurance that there is a way to make it, that there is hope in its own way.

Really influential, Mad respects goes to you and I wish you all the best moving forward in life in all of your journeys whether coding or not and wishing you a although early, happy new year man!

I have a few questions but you mentioned that you met JoeTurki, Where do you exactly meet such people, On hackernews (I am presuming you have created a new account?)

Because one of the ways that I find software, perhaps even software I can contribute once I get good enough and learn the fundamentals (honestly I am a gopher head too :) ) but some projects are written in C so perhaps I will learn that just to contribute to some/read them to maybe even rewrite them in golang perhaps but those are other ideas.

So the approach I make is probably hackernews -> good project -> gives me ideas/github projects -> I search for ideas when any problem comes in my head -> I then find github projects which are interesting -> I join their discord server -> I chat with their creator.

I think this has only happened in 1 project to be fair (librisc-V), I really love the elegance of librisc-V and I appreciate the creator of that project a lot too

So I am interested in how you meet people, because although one can get in discussions with hackernews with some pretty good people, I sometimes think that the discussion is rather limited in context so there's that and thus I am interested with this.

You mentioned "I decided I’d try for a different strategy: I got involved in an open source project related to video streaming", so I am fairly interested in how you decided to "jump in"/ try since I feel like this advice might help me

Also once again, The project is really good and I hope more open source projects can perhaps be built on top of it, and I genuinely hope you a nice day man!

I can't wait to see where your going/what you end up building :) I absolutely didn't have the skills you had at this point in my career.

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* What is the best way to get people interested/involved in Open Source/contributing? I am always looking to attract more people. What is Pion doing right and what could it be doing better?

* Doing this project what was the most surprising technical thing you learned? I haven't gone deep on Bandwidth Estimation, but it's super cool to me that loss + latency are really just heuristics. I get why it isn't possible, but it's a shame middle boxes can't just tell software 'You can send this much' :)