Open Source will make you better at Community

There's alot of talk out there about getting into Open Source to boost your resume and increase visibility to future employers. While Open Source is an amazing place to be when starting out your career or looking to expand your skillset, I'm here to argue that Open Source helps people who work in community roles excel at their jobs.

Now I know what you may be thinking. If you work in Developer Advocacy or an adjacent community role - you already spend a TON of time working in your community.

Here are 5 reasons I believe joining an Open Source community will help you grow as a community professional.

1.Empathy.

Working for a company that has a community element comes with many competing interests. You need to report on metrics of community growth and health, moderate, share knowledge on behalf of the company, and provide important feedback to product. What you lose here is what it's like to be on the other side of that equation which leads to the first benefit, empathy.

Yes, I know you are likely in this career path in part due to a nice helping of empathy in your personality already, however, I think this is a muscle that should continue to be worked. By being an active participant in a diverse developer community, you will notice what you love, what makes you feel safe, and what makes you enjoy being there. This knowledge can come back to your career in your moderation tactics, event strategies, how to foster growth and more.

2.Keep your skills sharp!

Many developer advocates chose this role over coding daily and in some cases barely write any code at all. If keeping your developer and collaboration skills in tact is important to you, spending a bit of time working in Open Source can scratch that itch.

As a bonus this also maintains your ability to empathisize with devs collaborating from all levels and geos. Are you seeing a theme? Exercising your empathy skills is so imporatnt to developer relations and community.

3.Keep up with the latest and greatest!

Depending on the product you support, you may find yourself nose down in a particular technology and not realize what is happening in other parts of tech. For example, supporting Wix and Velo developers, I spend alot of time working with Vanilla JS. I spend less time with frameworks now and they move fast! So working in Open Source helps me keep up with trends in webdev and JavaScript that I may not use in my day to day work right now.

4.Meet future collaborators and friends.

In developer advocacy we are always building relationships and sometimes looking for folks to collaborate on content, livestreams, podcasts, adn other creative pursuits. Being invovled with Open Source naturally exposes you to a wide variety of developers and through working together and getting to know each other you will make new friends and also future collaborators which are invaluable to what we do.

5.It's fun.

Okay, subjective. But, for me being part of Open Source has been a great time and I've really met some incredible folks. My bias is absolutely showing here, but I think my positive experience is in large part to the fantastic folks in the EddieHub community.

Open Source not your thing? That's okay too. The big takeaway here is that if you can manage the time, it is valuable to anyone working with communities to also be a part of a community. The perspective of being a community member will always be valuable to you professionally and hopefully, personally.

Like my ramblings? Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github.