
Start your open-source career - vvoyer
https://blog.algolia.com/start-your-open-source-career/
======
jordigh
Why do people want to have an "open-source" career at all? Why are people
asking, "what should I contribute to?"

I honestly don't understand this attitude at all, assuming the people who want
to "do" open source are in earnest, and not because they want to pad their CV
in order to get a job completely unrelated to free software. So, assuming you
really do want to do free development, why do you need help being told where
to start? The typical self-motivated reason to start is because you have found
open and free software that doesn't do what you want it to do, so you go
ahead, and by golly, you've had enough of these blighted bugs, and you're
going to make the software work for yourself (or rarely, for someone close to
you that you care about).

Shopping around for something to work on without having a personal problem to
solve seems like putting the cart before the horse. I assume that's not why
people want to do it. They must already have a personal problem. So, what is
it, what's the motivation to have a "career" in "open-source"?

~~~
dfabulich
I think there are a few answers to this.

1) There are a lot of worthy projects to contribute to. Should you work on
Firefox? Linux? LibreOffice? OpenSSL? I think it's as reasonable to ask "where
should I volunteer?" as it is to ask, "to which charity should I donate
money?"

2) Fame/clout. There are a number of Internet-famous developers who work in
open source. When they blog, people listen to what they have to say. When they
file a bug on an open-source project, people fix it. When they start a
project, people download it, try it, and contribute patches.

This is totally unlike the experience for ordinary developers. When most
people blog, nobody reads it. When most people file a bug, or even file a PR,
it just gets ignored. When most people start a project on github, nobody
notices it.

Clearly there is a path, however narrow, from here to there. How, people ask,
can I walk that path?

3) When people really are talking about an "open source career," they often
are asking, "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require
selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off.

4) In some cases, people are asking, "what are high-impact open-source
projects where it's easy for newbies to get started?" Even once you've chosen
a project, not all projects make it easy to submit your first patch.

~~~
kvz
> "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting
> good projects that have the potential to pay off.

Or selecting a company. E.g. at our company (transloadit) >80% of work is on
open source

------
drej
I must say Github has been amazing in enabling this, at least the first steps
bit. Ever since they introduced editing in the browser, I have committed to
maybe half a dozen open source projects. All of these were trivial one-liners
with very little added value, but still, given that I could do all that
without even having git on that given machine, is amazing. That + integrated
CI tools whose results are integrated within relevant pull requests... it's at
a point when almost anyone can fix documentation or typos in code.

~~~
vvoyer
True, and open-source projects can also have "Edit this page" links on every
pages that directly goes to the edit mode of the file, example:
[https://community.algolia.com/react-
instantsearch/guide/](https://community.algolia.com/react-
instantsearch/guide/)

We got many first time contributions with that.

------
juicy-fruit
Having a popular open source project is a pain in the ass. At some point the
happiness from seeing people use your project turns to annoyance once you
become the janitor and problem solver to people who won't take 1 minute to
read the README. However, I honestly appreciate people who create open source
software and answer all issues and questions.

GitHub should have a Q/A section on repos so that frequently asked questions
can be answered there instead of having someone open the same issue every few
months.

~~~
on_and_off
Indeed. I am on the watcher list of a project I use a lot and contribute to.

I don't know how the main maintainer can answer so many stupid questions in a
polite way.

99% of the answers are either in the ample doc of the project or a google
search away.

I am not even sure how to curb this.

~~~
VBprogrammer
Seems to me that this is an opportunity for someone who wants to contribute to
a project but lacks the technical skills to do so.

------
gilrain
Rust is among the most welcoming of communities to start out in. If you're
interested in the language, definitely check here for easy ways to get
involved.

[https://www.rustaceans.org/findwork/starters](https://www.rustaceans.org/findwork/starters)

~~~
waldir
It's worth noting that this newcomer friendliness is no accident: building and
maintaining a welcoming FOSS community, and doing so at scale, can only be
achieved with deliberate efforts.

The video [Rust's Community
Automation]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=407nwX6__70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=407nwX6__70))
offers an excellent summary of the strategies used in the Rust community to
handle the social dynamics so that both contributors and maintainers are able
to engage positively and productively, and continue doing so over extended
periods of time.

It's definitely something other projects should look at and replicate :)

------
ardi93
I've recently made a contribution to a well-known project (DBeaver, a database
management software). It started with a feature request and somehow I was able
to implement it myself. It sure makes you nervous when it's the first time
contributing, especially because your code/issue will be read by many other
people. But, once your PR is merged, you will feel you've accomplished
something great and want to contribute more.

------
RomanPushkin
I started my own project free libre open-source project. It become quite
popular in a year. I even found a guy who wanted to "invest" XXXk (I said no),
and I won a grant of 25k from one non-profit accelerator (but never able to
receive it). Also, I already had couple of job opportunities I rejected, and
already spoke with some legendary folks from Open Source world about the
future of the project. So it is definitely interesting and worth doing. The
only downside is you need to invest some time into it. So it's better to do
something what's really interesting for you.

------
thomastjeffery
Maybe a better title would be "start working open-source into your career".

The article is more geared toward those who think they don't fit into the
open-source community.

Rest assured, anyone is welcome; that is generally what free software is
about.

~~~
vvoyer
> The article is more geared toward those who think they don't fit into the
> open-source community.

Exactly what I wanted to outline in the article. Too often I thought that
open-source people where inside the NBA of developers, that's not true at all.
It's just people that have code visible by everyone. It's just code.

------
partycoder
I value the altruism of open source.

But I do not value people that piggyback on existing high profile projects for
personal gain.

If someone tells me they contribute to a project, I would usually check what
was actually contributed.

A couple of unit tests and docs are always helpful but do not give enough
credit compare to the effort of building such projects.

~~~
waldir
> A couple of unit tests and docs are always helpful but do not give enough
> credit compare to the effort of building such projects.

You might want to take a look at [https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-
contributors](https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors) :)

~~~
partycoder
If a contributor is responsible for significant part of the code coverage,
funding or documentation, by all means kudos.

But someone that donated $5 or wrote 2 test cases and a couple of comments to
me is a casual contributor not a core contributor.

------
notyourday
Thanks, but i like getting paid. That's why they call it "career".

~~~
nrhk
Yea but I also like getting paid more and adding a feature to something like
React or Node would pretty much put you in the upper echelon of JS developers
most companies will hire.

Also if you're switching to new frameworks and languages, doing open source
will open up your career opportunities.

~~~
notyourday
That's what people who want you to program their frameworks or produce some
other code for free would _really_ want you to believe.

~~~
richardknop
I think it is actually true. Just ask some of the people who created and
maintain some popular / high profile libraries or frameworks. That leads to a
lot of job offers and more demand for your services means you can charge more.

If you have companies reaching out to you with potential job offers
frequently, you can use that when negotiating salary when applying for a new
job or to negotiate a raise at your current job.

It's the same principle as the guy who interviewed at Google, Facebook, Airbnb
& dozen other companies and then used several offers he got to negotiate and
he ended up with ridiculously good package for software engineer.

~~~
notyourday
a) that's survivorship bias - for every one who "worked" on those frameworks
and got somewhere because of it, there are thousands who wasted their time. I
would go as far as to say that those who worked on those frameworks and got
hired would have been hired without that.

> If you have companies reaching out to you with potential job offers
> frequently, you can use that when negotiating salary when applying for a new
> job or to negotiate a raise at your current job

If you are one of those people who is a target of companies rather than
recruiters outreach, then you do not care about frameworks. Hint: these are
people who don't have interviews. They go for lunch. Or dinner.

> It's the same principle as the guy who interviewed at Google, Facebook,
> Airbnb & dozen other companies and then used several offers he got to
> negotiate and he ended up with ridiculously good package for software
> engineer.

That's an imaginary guy.

~~~
0x445442
You're right on track in this thread. My guess is Rob Pike was not answering
data structure and algorithm questions on a white board when he got hired at
Google.

------
orliesaurus
Open source has a problem where a lot of people demand and request updates,
fixes and all that without ever giving back. I am not talking about medium
sized companies or even smaller ones, I am talking to a plethora of small one
or two human teams that do consulting/freelance development and simply don't
have the visibility in the world of open source that others like maybe you and
me have. It feels a bit like the recycling problem, it's really easy to do yet
only a percentage of the population does it correctly. In the uk, on the
defra.gov.uk website, it states that only 16% of the picked up waste is
recycling... Why ? How can wr change that?

~~~
tzahola
>How can we change that?

When someone demands an update for your open source project, ask them what
they can give back in exchange?

~~~
nurettin
Even better: tell them what they give back in exchange. That is what patreon
and the like is about.

------
aphextron
What are some useful, active web based projects to contribute to?

~~~
echolot
It's a valid question, but you may want to start by contributing to OSS
projects that you actually use. The story in the article is about the author
and his cofounder contributing to a library they used heavily. You already
have a vested interest in things you use. The next step would be to visit the
git repo and see how you can help.

~~~
watwut
Why? This answer is most common one and always puzzled me. Just because I like
to use something does not mean it is good project for me to contribute to.
They tend to be very different categories.

Plus, the pool of people who have time to spare and want to do something is
different then pool of people who have scratches all around the projects.

~~~
UncleEntity
> Why? This answer is most common one and always puzzled me.

If you don't use it how do you know you're solving actual user problems?

I used to contribute to an OSS project and there were a lot of times where the
devs and users had differing opinions on how a feature should work.

~~~
figgis
> If you don't use it how do you know you're solving actual user problems?

There are many (many) ways to contribute to a project that doesn't require you
to be solving actual user problems.

I'd suggest just finding new projects, review code, create pull requests for
those small mistakes you see. Provide feedback if applicable. Etc.

------
grewil2
Different terms convey different ideas. Writers pick "open source" to signal
that they find user freedom unimportant, and "free software" or "libre
software" to signal that they find user freedom important. While the author's
intentions are probably good, it's interesting that neither user freedom nor
licenses are mentioned in this type of article.

In the unlikely case anyone wonders what I mean:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

