Hacker News Reader

Comment by steffan | Hacker News Reader

I don't consider them to be much of an influence.

If you can gain something from the course, take it for the knowledge. Don't expect it to make much difference with most employers.

Some legacy businesses may place more weight on certifications and courses, but I always look for relevant experience and demonstrated skills over pretty much anything on paper.

If you are strictly trying to make an impression on hiring managers, your time would be better spent creating a project or becoming involved with an open-source project that would allow you to demonstrate your skills and gain relevant experience with that domain.

View on HN

that is interesting. How can I find an open source project to contribute to that is actually open to beginners?

There are a lot of open source projects that are open to any help at all, as long as it conforms to at least a few best practice guidelines. For an example, take a look at jquery's policy: http://contribute.jquery.org/open-source/. They are very open and inviting for people to contribute.

I would suggest finding an open source tool or application you use often and finding their project (most likely on Github). Take a look at bug reports and issues. See if you can help out with these. Maybe they are just usage mistakes ("I can't get this thing to work right!!" "Oh, have you tried to click the button which does that? Here's a screenshot."). As you go through issues you'll find real bugs and some won't be terribly hard to fix. Jump in and fix it, then submit a pull request to have it merged into the project. The project will either accept the pull request or comment on it if they feel you a) need to add more to it or b) didn't actually solve the problem. You can then learn from their advice and soon you'll be far from a beginner.

Getting started in open source can seem daunting but really it's fun and not nearly as hard as it might seem.

100 times this. I want to state for the whole world (even though this thread is a bit dead) that Paul Irish is a really nice dude and the barriers to entry to help are tiny in jquery.

I remember one day just showing up in #jquery on freenode and complaining about some spam on their wiki. 10 minutes of talking later it was "Well, do you want the keys to the kingdom to maintain it?"

I think a big reason jquery was adopted so heavily was not just the tool being useful, but the attitude and the community around it.

Drupal is open to beginners too. See https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours for more info. Basically, you can join an IRC channel and let them know you're new to the project and want to help, and you'll have a ton of people ready to assist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com