1.3. Opening Your Future!
Articulate your vision or dream of what you want to achieve through participation and leadership in open source, and experiment with expressing your vision in a short format.
Format
- Read posts this topic
- Complete your Open Source Career Map activity.
Prerequisites
Have completed previous chapters in this section
Materials
A way of recording your assignment – pencil and paper or a computer.
‘Photo credit: MTSOfan via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-SA’
Contributing to Open Source software is truly an opportunity to grow as an individual, gain new skills, find unparalleled opportunity for leadership, and perhaps to change the world in the process. It can also be a tricky place to navigate various project norms and personalities in the quest to achieving those goals.
Personal Inspiration
Inspiration has many incarnations - we can find it in experiences, interactions, and in opportunity. Take some time to read through the stories of community listed below.
Read Jess Frazelle’s Open Source Story
“Contributing also makes me prioritize working on open source code. I now understand just how cool it is to be able to “ping” an expert when you need help. For example, when we were building the user namespaces support into Docker, a kernel maintainer for namespaces commented on the pull request and made sure it was implemented correctly. It’s so valuable for a project to not only have input from others but from the actual people who built what you are trying to integrate.” - Jess Frazelle
Read Henry Zhu’s Open Source Story.
Working on it helped me a lot, because I earned many of the skills I later used for my studies in University and my actual job. - Errietta Kostala
Read Why I love Contributing to Open Source by Errietta Kostala
Career
Whether or not you have goals to work in open source, there’s no doubt the experiences, skills and stories you build will influence not only your career success, but even where you choose to go from here.
Read 7 Skills to Land Your Open Source Dream Job - Jason Hibbits
That was only half of what impressed the interviewer, though: the other reason is that he’d shown the foresight to get out there and get experience for himself.
Read How to Get a Job in Open Source by Jono Bacon
Read What Open Source Can do for You - Open Hatch
Assignment: Building Your Open Future
This activity is important, and will be referenced in the remainder of the modules, please take time to fill out your own Open Source Career Map.
Assignment: Bonus Activities
These activities are optional, but a great way to learn more about the job ecosystem for open source skills.
Interview someone working in Open Source and write a summary, either in a blog post or document.
Write a Bot! Write a bot to manually look for open source keywords in a job posting, note which are in demand and report your findings. note: job postings are only one piece of understanding hirability in open source