
Ask HN: Commercial projects versus open source? - theoverworked
I find potential employers pushing open source (github activity, etc) projects a lot. I feel this discourages me from working on commercial (closed source) projects.<p>How does one balance closed source work while maintaining a &quot;public&quot; presence in the open source world. Time is so limited and splitting focus doesn&#x27;t seem like a good plan.
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davismwfl
So the answer depends. If you are working in Enterprise America, then you have
to start contributing to open source projects on your own and outside of your
"day" job.

If you are working at a small company or startup that is using other open
source projects/products, you can contribute to those projects to help improve
your company and get paid to do it.

In the end, if you are hacking on something you think is neat or interesting,
put it out there. The worse thing is no one notices, the best is you now have
things you can point to.

Personally, I use a combination of all the above, yet I am the first to admit,
I screwed up early on in that I used a company email/GitHub account I had to
do most of my contributions instead of my personal email. Had I used my
personal it would have made my contributions easier to track, but either way
they are provable.

Either way, the more you put yourself out there the better. Good luck!

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explosion
While working on a commercial project, you typically have to write some code
that isn't related directly to the core business. This code can be open
sourced as a library.

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ChuckMcM
You should not feel discouraged. If you consider the whole "white board
exercise" you might think of open source github projects like that. Bits of
code you can write to learn about bloom filters, or try comparing sorts. Also
you can 'fork' an open source project and submit pull requests from it on
Github.

But it does pre-suppose that you like to dabble in writing code in your "free"
time.

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bbcbasic
I don't worry about potential employers. I've done a bit of open source for
fun. But now I can't be bothered working for free and would rather do
commercial stuff for side projects. Happy to show a PE some of the code, but
it ain't going to be on Github.

