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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Top notch comment.

Also, it's a very risky path to take. If you made an error in your assumptions about your open source investment, tech stack choice, etc, then you won't see any good return, but you burned through your savings.

Contribute to something that has gotten big, quickly.

I chose Rails 14 years ago and have been riding that train ever since.

If I were choosing a new space and starting out, I’d contribute to Kubernetes. Lots of need in that space and I’m sure you could demand top dollar once you have a few merged PRs under your belt.

Agree, but OTOH, this advice is pretty well disseminated at this point.

It can be hard to find an opening to contribute in a decent OSS project that one can keep up with, especially as a beginner, with many others clamoring to do the same.

I think an alternative would be to create and finish a simple open source project yourself, for the purpose of showing off. Scratch an itch. But keep it finishable. It's not about being perfect, it's about showing you can solve many problems.

I think you missed the main point. The most important part of root comment’s advice is networking —- to meet and work with other devs. If you start your own open source project there’s not guarantee people will work on it with you.

As a beginner myself I wouldn’t even know where to begin to contribute to something like Kubernetes and agree with your point. Those projects have a lot of eyes on them and the talent to follow, what value could I add as a beginner that someone with experience couldn’t do in a heartbeat(or hasn’t already).

People with more experience have all their time taken up by big features and refactorings. In a big project, there are always small things to fix or improve. It's not like they run out, because those big changes create more small things to fix all the time. Linux is 30 years old, and it still accepts patches from beginners regularly.

I don't know about Kubernetes, but lots of large and well-managed projects have issues labelled as "good first issue" to help you know where to start.

Agreed. There are certainly challenges to working on big, high-visibility projects as a beginner. But, if it's primarily part of a strategy to get a well-paying job, it makes a lot of sense to work on something that has people from the companies that are hiring developers at decent salaries working on it.

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