It's common to find yourself engrossed in activities like watching multiple episodes of your favorite series each week. However, what if those hours could be redirected toward building a tech career that brings both personal satisfaction and professional recognition?
Transforming Leisure Time into Career Opportunities
Many individuals spend significant time on passive entertainment, such as streaming shows or browsing the internet. Redirecting even a portion of this time toward contributing to open source projects can yield substantial career benefits. Open source contributions not only enhance technical skills but also increase visibility to potential employers, paving the way for career advancement.
A Strategic Approach to Career Development
Time invested in open source contributions can be significantly more valuable than hours spent on passive entertainment. For example:
One season of a popular series typically requires around 13 hours.
A meaningful contribution to an open source project can be accomplished in approximately 2-3 hours.
By dedicating just a fraction of your leisure time to open source work, you can make multiple contributions that enhance your visibility to potential employers.
The 15-Minute Contribution Strategy
Adopting a disciplined approach to open source contributions can yield substantial career benefits. Here's a concise guide to getting started:
(WHO'S GONNA CARRY THE BOATS?! 💪)
- Identify an Issue: Begin by selecting a manageable bug or feature request within a project you are interested in.
- Review Documentation: Spend a few minutes understanding the project's guidelines and requirements to ensure your contribution aligns with its standards.
- Implement the Solution: Make the necessary code changes or improvements.
- Submit a Pull Request: Share your contribution with the project maintainers for review and integration.
This methodical process not only improves your technical skills but also demonstrates your initiative and ability to collaborate within a development community.
The Benefits of Open Source Contributions
Engaging with open source projects offers several advantages:
Skill Development: Enhance your coding abilities and learn new technologies.
Professional Visibility: Showcase your work to a global community of developers and potential employers.
Networking Opportunities: Connect with industry professionals and collaborate on meaningful projects.
Career Advancement: Open source contributions can lead to job offers from leading tech companies.
Preparing for Career Opportunities
Tech recruiters highly value candidates who actively contribute to open source projects. While traditional job seekers may focus on coding challenges and interview preparations, open source contributors demonstrate practical experience and a commitment to continuous learning.
Steps to Maximize Your Open Source Impact:
Choose Relevant Projects: Select projects that align with your interests and the technologies you wish to master.
Start Small: Begin with minor issues or documentation improvements to build confidence and familiarity with the project.
Be Consistent: Regular contributions can significantly enhance your portfolio and attract recruiter attention.
Engage with the Community: Participate in discussions, seek feedback, and collaborate with other contributors to expand your professional network.
Explore These Open Source Projects
SWIRL AI Search
Description: SWIRL is AI Search for the Enterprise. It works like Perplexity but focuses on your internal data, offering a highly configurable and open-source solution.
What You'll Learn:
- Enterprise-grade AI search applications.
- Data security principles in AI implementations.
- Hands-on experience with highly configurable open-source tools.
Skills to Showcase:
- Python programming.
- API integrations.
- AI and ML-driven search algorithms.
Postiz App
Description: Postiz is a social media scheduler with AI integration, making content scheduling smarter and more efficient.
What You'll Learn:
- Building social media automation tools.
- AI integrations in SaaS products.
- Enhancing user interfaces for better productivity.
Skills to Showcase:
- TypeScript and Next.js.
- Modern UI/UX development.
- Open source collaboration.
Resume Matcher
Description: An open-source project that leverages language models to compare resumes with job descriptions for better matching.
What You'll Learn:
- Natural language processing for text comparison.
- Developing tools for career and HR domains.
- Contributing to open-source projects.
Skills to Showcase:
- Python programming.
- Machine learning applications.
- Software development collaboration.
Cyclops
Description: Cyclops simplifies Kubernetes management with an intuitive UI, designed to make Kubernetes accessible to all developers.
What You'll Learn:
- Kubernetes operations and management.
- Intuitive UI/UX for DevOps tools.
- Open-source development workflows.
Skills to Showcase:
- Go programming.
- Kubernetes expertise.
- Open-source contributions.
Opik
Description: An open-source end-to-end platform for developing, deploying, and monitoring large language models (LLMs).
What You'll Learn:
- Building and evaluating large language models.
- AI application deployment and monitoring.
- Open-source platform development.
Skills to Showcase:
- Python and Java programming.
- AI development frameworks.
- Monitoring and logging for AI apps.
Apache Superset
Description: A powerful platform for data visualization and exploration, used by organizations worldwide for interactive insights.
What You'll Learn:
- Creating interactive data visualizations.
- Techniques for analyzing and exploring datasets.
- Developing scalable data tools in an open-source environment.
Skills to Showcase:
- Python and JavaScript programming.
- Data visualization techniques.
- Collaboration in large-scale open-source projects.
Llama Stack
Description: Llama Stack provides composable building blocks to create advanced applications using modular architecture.
What You'll Learn:
- Application development with composable architecture.
- Building frameworks for modular apps.
- Using pre-defined components for rapid prototyping.
Skills to Showcase:
- Application development principles.
- Modular and composable architecture design.
- Open-source framework development.
Pro Tip: Select one project and dedicate 15 minutes to make your first contribution. Consistency is key to building a strong portfolio and advancing your career.
Happy New Year, My DEV friends!!
Embrace the New Year with Purpose 💖
As the new year begins, seize the opportunity to realign your goals and invest in your professional growth.
Redirecting even a small portion of your leisure time to contribute to open source projects can significantly enhance your technical skills and build a standout portfolio. I wish you the best for 2025 🚀
Top comments (33)
While I am with you on the overall idea, my experience is mostly negative with trying to help open source projects. Most of the time, the self-acclaimed Gods of the respective project go to extremes to avoid any input from outsiders. Hostility, arrogance and neglect: that's what you have to deal with aside from the actual issues those Gods implemented.
I do believe that forking projects just to fix an issue is idiotic - but it's still becoming a norm.
Personally, I stepped away from cooperation on projects and switched to paid gigs instead, both ways: writing invoices for things I do and paying for things others do for me.
Coop with today's open source Gods... Not much fun in that.
Yes this is also true for the project as well.
Not every issue / feature request will get implemented. Even if you have PRs for this. I have seen in many projects, some good working PRs which add in some features never gets merged.
First of all, never do things hoping for attention. Do them, cuz you felt the struggle because it ain't was present there. It's not the gods we are trying to please, it's 'peasants' like us we tryna help.
I stopped "doing things for attention" a few decades ago. I am too old for that.
Unfortunately, I don't understand your terminology "tryna" (or "cuz"), not sure what you are telling me there.
As for "help": When I try to help developers fixing issues with their projects, I am trying to help them first helping others second helping many third and helping me :-) It's a give-and-take.
Unfortunately, in my experience the world has changed over the last ... maybe 5-10 years? I don't see much coop in open source development any more. It's usually mostly about showing off how good you are at coding (today, at using chatGPT or something) or copying code from stackoverflow. It USED to be about creating tools that were useful to many.
Again, let me reiterate: I am in line with the gist of the article. I am merely saying, out of experience, that it has become very, very frustrating trying to join in with existing projects. The huge amount of forks (most forgotten and unmaintained) we have seen growing is, from my point of view, mostly because of the attitude too many "open source developers" have developed (see what I did there!) in the last few years. It has become so hard by now that many of my generation tend away from open source towards well maintained, supported and professionally run projects.
Sad, but - again! - experience based.
Also, maybe you can focus on smaller projects and connect with the author/owner of the repo before you can get started with the contribution.
True if you are starting out or if you are trying to get into the game!
However, when you are trying to fix an issue with a somewhat larger project (I can think of really painful examples here) this isn't that helpful. (deleted some examples here since I don't want to diss actually good projects just because of current maintainers)
You are correct, however for learning and bug fixing I found larger projects really helpful as they simulate actual corporate experience. Where you are supposed to get used to a larger code base and start contributing.
The only difference I found is that:
All in all, it's a good time to learn, YMMV.
But Marc, you are correct as well.
I doubt you can make a meaningful change in 15min, that's just spamming.
I made a PR in a codebase I'm familiar with yesterday and it took me 2-3h, all included. Given most of it spent on writing test and getting linter, formatter to check, but that's also part of the work
You're correct. My main goal is to get people started and break the barrier. And they'll learn from the experience as well.
Yeah, may be. It happens at times with me too. But, have you never ever got any projects where you initially allocated multiple hours but 'magically'(or being in the right environment and mindset) got them done way early too??
Also, if something takes 2-3 hours, take some proper break between, most times, it actually end up saving time than delaying further. Just talking from my life.
The fact that Kubernetes was designed to simplify container management and it took needs another project to simplify that is funny. If this project grows and becomes another standard that is listed on resumes/CVs, it too will need a project to manage it, this is how Java became the mess it is today, this is abstraction on abstraction on abstraction...
Yeah, kinda reminds of LangChain as well.
This commend remains me of JavaScript 😅
Sometimes a 30 lines of code can be written in few lines, i mean that is what we should target while trying to contribute for an open source projects.
Basically code optimization is also very important as well.
Yeah, good point!
Great list!
Thanks
Thanks @fast for this greate article that encourages me to ask for feedback for my first open-source (VizBlend) project. If it got your interest, kindy star it ⭐
Check out this post on dev community.
Sure!
WHO'S GONNA CARRY THE LOGS?! 🪵 🛶 💪
YES!!
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you as well mate!
Thanks for share!
You're welcome!
Nice write up
Thanks :)