I read a book called "The Passionate Programmer" in 2009 that turned me on to what was happening in the open source community at the time. It was the first I had heard of Rails, Ycombinator/Hacker News, alot of things really.

During the last few years doing Windows-stack work I was a top performer at the company I was working with, had gotten two relatively recent promotions, turned down an op going into management, and was so unhappy that I considered leaving software altogether. Transitioning to open source stack work 'lifted the cloud' - so to speak - and reinvigorated my love of programming.