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Open Invitation: Experiance via Open Source
I just responded to a message on the Israeli .NET dev forum, where the poster asked how they can gain experiance when all the jobs require experience. The poster assumed that in order to contribute to an open source project, he would need experience as well.
Well, consider this an open invitation for anyone that can pick up an if statement, to contribute to the following open source projects.
- NHibernate
- Castle Active Record
- Castle MonoRail
- Castle Windsor
- Rhino Mocks
- Rhino Commons
- Rhino Igloo
- NHibernate Query Analyzer
- NHibernate Query Generator
- Linq for NHibernate
I don't care about grades or time in the industry, I would only care about the contributions that you can make. Get the source, and see if you can make things better. (Just to clarify, this option is opened for experienced developers as well)
What do you get from it?
- Warm fuzzy feeling :-)
- More work
- The chance to work with some really smart people on really fun projoects
- Experience that you couldn't get anywhere else.
How you can help?
- Add documentations.
- Find a bug and fix it:
- NHibernate JIRA: http://jira.nhibernate.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa
- Castle JIRA: http://support.castleproject.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa
- Add new features.
- Write sample applications.
You can talk to the development teams here:
- NHibernate-dev mailing list: nhibernate-development AT lists.sourceforge.net
- Castle-dev mailing list: castle-project-devel AT googlegroups.com
- Rhino Tools-dev mailing list: rhino-tools-dev AT googlegroups.com
NHibernate source:
Castle source:
Rhino Tools source:
Comments
I'd like to throw SubtextProject.com into that mix of projects looking for contributors.
Steve Harman is a great example of this principle. He was a Java programmer before he started contributing to Subtext and learning C#. My company (at the time) ended up hiring him based on his awesome contributions.
I've written about hiring open source developers before. 37Signals for example publicly state they only hire OSS developers.
Hmm, I think I provide some small support. I sometimes write an article for a .NET Magazine published by Microsoft in the Netherlands. I try to write once in a while, and most of the time it will be about an open source project. I've written an article about NHibernate (was too late for publishing, another writer came first), and am currently writing an article about Castle Windsor.
I think getting people to work with the open source projects is a lot of support too.
Yours,
Mark Monster
I agree that contributing to Open Source is a great way to get experience, and something useful to put on your Resume.
However, I interview a lot of people, and I mean a LOT ... and the experience that people put on their resume's is almost always misleading, usually a down right lie, and even when it is strictly true, it rarely means they can actually develop half competently.
So, forget agents that tell you a year isn't enough. If you can do the job then tell them so. If they don't listen go to another agent, and if that doesn;t work go to companies directly.
I couldn't care less if a resume has 1 year or 5 years experience, I care about whether someone can do the job I need doing.
The only problem is if you're going to be interviewed by the HR who probably has no clue about you being a contributor to an OSS project, which is probably what most with less experience is worried about. The HR might just be black and white "We need dev with N years of experience, blah blah", this really is true if the company is just hiring for their new IT profs/devs, like what was quoted "Talking from a head hunter point of view, I am not even rated for a beginner's job".
bonskijr,
Would you care to work at such a place?
OSS give you one other thing that is invaluable, connections. I would love to work with a lot of the guys that participate in the OSS projects that I contribute to. I am pretty sure that this is the matter in most cases. Phil Haack attribute his success at hiring in VeloIT to hiring people he knew via OSS projects. I can certainly see the value there.
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