There are lots of people that are very passionate about machine learning and artificial intelligence. I would say try to find a meetup group near by (meetup.com). If your area isn't really a tech hub, I'm sure there is a near by University with a computer science department. You could always try to talk to a professor there that is doing similar research.
This is a great first step to make government applications a little bit more functional. I would absolutely fix some bugs on a city website after I get frustrated with it.
I feel like code ownership is a good thing in general. It makes you care a lot more about the product you're eventually shipping. It was a big deal at Amazon when I was there, and I'm assuming it still is. Sometimes I was not happy fixing things at 2am when I was on call or cleaning up a bunch of code that had been neglected for a while, but the feeling of ownership definitely motivated me to care about the issues and fix what was wrong.
A lot of the problems in the article have more to do with your ability to work with others and how bad your ego is. If you can't work well as a team and mentor more junior engineers it's going to be a struggle to advance your career
I agree completely. I usually have the most problems with packages delivered through the US Postal Service and I haven't had any problems to speak of with Amazon delivery.