This guy is selling out hard. Coming from a guy with a more active GitHub and projects, I don't see how this guy is any different than any American college kid.
He isn't much different from a run of the mill college kid. He just has a "startup style" website with gratuitous pictures of himself all over it. It's called "personal marketing." Apparently software engineers are supposed to do that nowadays - our code no longer speaks for itself.
code still speaks for itself. it just has to be framed and delivered to an audience. your side project that's sitting on your hard drive or even your unpublicized github account isn't doing you any good.
Um... I am old and I don't have time to work on side projects - I have dying parents I need to spend time with because I won't get that time back. I have friends that live all over the East Coast now and visiting them is very important and now time consuming. My point is this is incredibly superficial and the stuff that matters (his actual work) gets lost in all the needless fluff.
Plus I'm too busy getting my actual work done to "market" myself.
You've got your thing going on and he's got his. There's no one right answer to life. It's all good.
Standard American college kid doesn't really have opensource contributions to speak of.