Cover Image: Eyeglasses in Front of Laptop Computer by Christina Morillo
I give a lot of career advice. I mentor interns, juniors, and random peopl...
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The way I broke into the web-dev industry was contributing two full weeks to an open-source codebase called Teambox and then I became their CTO overnight. I've never held less than a CTO position since.
Open source is the egalitarian's dream for career progression.
I contribute to Dev.to codebase and the AWS Docs when I can.
I have to begrudgingly contribute to a few ruby gems since all the 10x ruby developers sailed out to Valinor, the Undying Lands, across the sea to the west.
I just had a wonderful Zoom call with Ben, Jess and Nick tackling a big old and ugly ticket.
github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...
If you ever want to show you have good team skills, Open Source a strong qualifier.
"Be useful on the internet" - this is a powerful advice and i will endeavor to live by it.
In my experience, it makes you feel good and it also tends to result in great opportunities; it's a win-win.
Hi Jacob,
that's a great article. Thanks for creating and giving such amazing tips for contributing to open source projects. Looking forward to reading more and also to contribute more to open source projects.
Hey! Thanks for reading Christine. 🤠 Hopefully, this is useful to you in some way. I think if I had this information earlier, I would have started working on Open Source earlier in my career.
First off, great story. Inspirational and some great suggestions on how to get involved in open source for those who haven't, like myself!
I have a similar (but not as cool story). I've been been running a personal blog for a few years but I'm not a frequent writer by any means. I take pride in posting quality content about topics that I have expertise on and ensure my articles are very thorough. For me, it was just a fun past-time and opportunity to share my knowledge with the larger developer community, until one day when a content manager from Logrocket.com found me. Although I didn't have a ton of blog posts in my portofolio, I believe what I had caught his eye because of quality. Since then I have been writing for the LogRocket blog and getting paid to do so. It's been a blast so far!
Hey Jacob, I always thought about doing small contributions to open source projects and have done them, but I always felt it was insignificant -- although the authors were always very happy to see me contributing! I should keep doing it :) amazing and congratulations on your well-earned money! 🎉
As a maintainer -- I'm never unhappy when someone makes a small improvement. I especially love documentation updates because that is a huge driving force for adoption.
One of the first things I do when I'm looking into a new Open Source project is trying to fix typos and unclear documentation. It forces me to read the docs, and I can be helpful!
I think more than anything, this shows how important branding is for senior and freelance developers. If you want to get the good, high paying jobs, you need to show your skills. Open Source contributions is only one of the many ways you can do that. Being on Dev.to and writing about what you know is a great option too!
You're totally right. Having a bit of reputation can be extremely useful when it comes to building your career, that's one of the things I talk to a lot of my podcast guests about.
Avdi talked a bit about that when we chatted.
I got a question Jacob ,how can you join the open source community and also what language are requiere to start helping ...
Is there an specific programming languages for the world of open source ?
Also why people are saying java is dean I hear that for long time now like java is gonna be dead I couple more years ..., but I love c#..
Java is definitely not dead. It's everywhere! Spring is a popular framework, and Java is used for a huge percentage of Android development (with Kotlin). C# is also a wonderful programming language, I think it's actually getting more popular!
Personally, I first started getting involved by finding a project that we used heavily at work. For me, that was Solidus.
DEV is also Open Source, so if you want to work on a friendly project, that's a fun one!
Thank you great for your answer ,so interesting
G'day Jacob, your article has resonated something I've longed to articulate, and it's your innovative approach that has inspired me to commence on a path with certainty for which I am grateful. Perhaps this was one of the many reasons that convinced you to share this with the world. Watch this space. You deserve the gratitude thanks
Haha thanks! Glad it helped! 🤠
Great article, I enjoyed reading it. However, I am part of the Grammar Fourth Reich !!
"One thing leads to another and eventually, Alberto extends an invitation to the Solidus Core Team."
Did you mean literally that, or rather that Alberto extended the invitation to you, to join the Solidus Core Team ?
Your choice.
Very cryptic, Herr Herrington !
I choose that the invitation is for anyone that wants to be part of the team, thats the beauty of OSS
Great article, but how did you become involved with Solidus to begin with - how did get to the point of making that first PR? Were you using Solidus on a project?
Your advice is great but the point for many people is which OSS project they should pick to work on, if there isn't something obvious that naturally presents itself (best choice is of course to contribute to a project that you're using and benefiting from).
In this case, my employer is building a product on top of Solidus.
However, my employer didn't actually ask me to work on the project, I was just looking for an OSS project to work on and that one made sense!
Right! Yes that was a perfect opportunity then, and as always in life, one thing leads to the other. Thanks for the great story and the great advice!
Happy you found it helpful!
Hi Jacob, thanks for the helpful post! Could you talk about how you ran into Solidus in the first place? I remember looking for substantial, open source Rails codebases containing fully functional apps, a while ago. Aside from dev.to itself (which is how I found this site!), I didn't find many. Even awesome-rails does not feature Solidus in its listing... so I'm curious :D
My company was building on it. Here are a few OS Rails app that might help you, if you're still looking:
github.com/codetriage/codetriage
github.com/discourse/discourse
github.com/rubyforgood/diaper
github.com/houndci/hound
github.com/ManageIQ/manageiq
Oops, I see below that you've already commented to someone that your employer was working on a project using Solidus - sorry about the repeat question!
Hi Jacob, this is an inspirational one. Since few weeks I have been trying to learn how can I find projects with react.js, redux only because that's what I have been working mostly and I want to see the standard code that such high profile developers write. So in the process I documented naive tricks that helped me, here dev.to/oathkeeper/finally-found-a-.... This way I could find projects which are open source documentation like dvc.org and a game title website that people are building.
I am really hopping to grow my career and find such opportunities, but when I start reading code it gives those thrills inside at the same time I feel soothing looking at so pure, fresh, non-hassling code. Thus, my majore thing turn more towards learning such approach. Thank you for sharing this info, I guess 1.5 year I'm in my career and its still not late to keep doing this thing more. Thanks for sharing!
Great write-up, thanks for sharing!
No problem, glad you enjoyed it!
Great article! We need more solid human beings like you.
You just motivated me to get involved. You state some excellent advice for junior or senior programmers by the way. Please keep giving back to the community.
I'd say your title leans a bit towards clickbait, as you need to get a client in the first place, and practice web programming. Would have been nice if you would have focused on getting yourself onto one of the major projects payroll.
I agree with the title being clickbaity, I've been experimenting with different titles lately.
However, getting the client was kind of the point of the article. I didn't do anything to get a client, they came to me because of my Open Source contributions to the tool they were using.
Apart from PR, is there any way we can help open source and also benefit in monetization way?
Some projects (like Solidus) allow you to contribute with your wallet. In exchange, you can be advertised as a preferred agency or consultant. That can be useful. Otherwise doing community management or helping to troubleshoot issues can have the same effect as contributing code
Hi All - I am CTO & Co-Founder of Macrometa. Happy to help (ex: like provide visibility, reference, hiring etc) for any one interested in building open source / demos on our globally available geo-distributed data platform. The platform is a multi-model (KV, Graph, Doc, Streams) geo-distributed streaming database with local read-write latencies. You can see more at macrometa.co/macrometa-in-2
You can reach me at dg@macrometa.co. No spam please.
Regards,
Durga
I like your content, but not a fan of the click bait title 🙄
Haha, I'm actually just experimenting with titles right now.
Although, this particular title is pretty accurate imo.
It would help me though if you could propose a better title for this article.
It is accurate indeed.
As long as the opening paragraph isn't shilling some shit-coin or whatnot I'd say it's groovy smoothie. 👍
Ben Orenstein is where I originally heard the quote "Be useful on the internet" as well. Good words to live by! Life is just generally better when everyone is trying to help everyone else :)
He is a smart guy. I think he told me that he got the advice from someone else, but I can't remember exactly.
I've found it's a great way to live.
Hmmm that's a intresting perspective on contributing to open source
There are a lot of reasons to contribute to Open Source, this is just one example of why I recommend others contribute.
In general, it's just a great idea to try and contribute to the projects you like. 😉
Thanks for this inspiring article. As I'm looking for good ways to contribute to open source, this has been an interesting read.
Take a look at Richard Schneeman's project codetriage.com, it lists Open Source projects that are looking for help with information about their tech stack.
Hey, thanks for writing this. It was a really insightful read.
Sure thing, I hope it's helpful.
Heck yeah, dude! This has been my thought process. Glad to see that it panned out well for you. Also reaffirming what I have initially done. Thanks for sharing.
No problem, glad it was encouraging!
Hey Jacob, thanks for such a wonderful article and guiding us. Truly inspired by your story.
Glad to hear you liked it!
Hello - Thanks for the article. Really enjoyed. What is your favourite guide / getting started for getting into Open Source?
thx
I don't think I know of many guides, but I do recommend codetriage.com to people pretty frequently!
Thanks for sharing your story! 😄