Ask HN: How can I leverage my Open-Source contributions to further my career? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I leverage my Open-Source contributions to further my career?

15 pointsWilandOr190312 comments

Here are a few suggestions.

* List open source on your resume.

* During interviews talk about your open source accomplishments. Use open source as a way to show you have experience in software development. This is especially helpful with team based open source projects.

* If you are contributing to an open source project with a community be vocal in that space. Answer stack overflow questions, write blog posts, tweet, and get involved in other online areas where discussion takes place.

* Build a website for your open source project. HTML content is easier for most people to consume compared to a github repo with README.md.

* Speak at a conference or meetup. A great way to get started with this is to give a 5 minute lighting talk demo for the project at your local language meetup.

Doing these things will help you market yourself and your open source work. This usually opens the door to networking with people that have similar interests, which is a great way to further your career.

The simplest way is to put your contributions on your resume, and many (good) companies will actually ask you to explain what your contributions were. Many companies see active OS contributions to be a big plus.

So, you don't have actively leverage it, the companies that value your OS contributions will see it as a big plus point in your resume.

However, what you can do is leverage the power of the OS community to get jobs. This can be very useful when first starting out.

That makes sense. So far, most of the recent interviews I've had have asked me about my work experience, and none of my open-source work, even though that work is on my CV.

Are your open source contributions small or are they large, like contributions to a well known database or a well known web framework?

They're for a (somewhat) niche iOS project, so not terribly well-known.

Then therein lies the problem. If you want large returns, you need to make good contributions to large or well known projects.

Otherwise, your work really has no context in which it can be judged favorably.

No, that is absolutely not a problem. If an interviewer is interested in your OSS contributions, hes's not going to be any less impressed because it's a project he's never heard of.

The simple fact that you have OSS on your resume makes you stand out. Period. I have seen exactly one resume with OSS on it in all the years I conducted interviews.

One.

That's actually quite encouraging, so thank you. I've been trying to find a balance between working on OSS contributions + getting better at "CS fundamentals" (I'm a self-taught programmer, so a bit lacking on the algs/data structures side of things). Which is definitely a disadvantage during an interview, and part of the reason I'm hoping to emphasize my OSS contributions more.

I did a brief screencast of something I'd built, and showed it on my tablet during an interview, which was well received although it was not a technical interview.

How do you list your open source contributions on your resume? Unless you are applying to SV based, startup, technology company, just listing open source contribution under "Open Source Contribution" title is not going to have much impact.

You have to customize the information depending on the company and how likely the group you are applying to cares about open source contribution or connects the dots.

Considering you are contributing to iOS open source project and assuming you are applying to iOS/mobile related opportunities, I will suggest listing your contributions under "Professional Activities" or "Personal iOS/Mobile Activities/Projects'.

In iOS area, you might be better off creating your own side app and listing that on resume than open source contributions.

Look for company's which are using the OpenSource projects you are contributing to .

Unfortunately (as of right now), there are no large companies that are using the projects I contribute to (there are some great indie devs who are though!)

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