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Cover image for Contributing to Tech Communities: How Open-Source can land you a job and get you out of the Skill Paradox ๐Ÿ’ผ

Contributing to Tech Communities: How Open-Source can land you a job and get you out of the Skill Paradox ๐Ÿ’ผ

Lucas Lima do Nascimento on September 26, 2023

Hello there! TL;DR In this article, weโ€™re going to see how open-source can change your career for the better and get you out...
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Mihovil Ilakovac

I think docs contributions are often looked down on, but they mean a ton.

Hack for first time contribution:

  1. Fork a project
  2. Install the Grammarly extension in VS Code
  3. Go through the docs markdown - you'll find some typos or missing articles
  4. Make the maintainers of that project happy ๐Ÿ˜Š

This is a thing that makes everyone's docs more high quality, but usually it's overlooked.

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Jimmy Lipham

I can definitely see how docs contributions could be looked down upon in our circles. However to our organization, and many others, developers that write great documentation are worth their weight in gold. One of the highest costs we have is the slow ramp of developers into our ecosystem.

Personally, I see it as a sign of maturity.

Love this hack!

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vincanger

oh this is a great idea :)

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Jan Peterka

heh, now I want to write automation for this. project for this weekend? ๐Ÿ˜…

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Matija Sosic

100% percent :)

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

This is an amazing tip actually, typos are easy to fix and really bad for documentations. Perfect for the first issue since you generally have to read the docs to do it hahaha

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Angel Oduro-Temeng Twumasi

I think I love this. How do I get started with this kind of contributing to open source

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Anietie Brownson

Great hack ๐Ÿ˜€

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Matija Sosic

An amazing write-up, Lucas! I especially like that you selected Wasp as an example for OSS contributions :).

My 2c - even if you find an issue that sounds interesting to you and somebody else has already expressed interest in solving it, IMHO it's often still worth it to ask what the status is and that you would be interested as well. Oftentimes the original assignee didn't have enough time to start/finish, or he could use some help!

It's a great way to start the discussions and meet people along the way - that's often how the best contributions and features are made :).

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

100% agreed, Matija! It's a win-win situation where you meet new people and potentially make some even greater contributions!

Thanks for the comment!

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Nevo David

I have seen it many times!
Contribute a valuable contribution to open-source, and wait for companies to offer you a job!

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Martin ล oลกiฤ‡ • Edited

The most common point of failure for new contributors that I noticed is taking a too big bite -> they jump on a feature that is harder than they predicted, give it a try a bit, spend some energy on it and give up. While this is sometimes unavoidable, there are two things that we can do about that:

  1. As a project maintainer, we can describe, in each "good first issue" issue, what skills it requires to be solved, give some initial idea of what the solution could look like, basically any info that will paint the picture of what is required to solve this issue.
  2. As a potential contributor, we can communicate our skill level and ask for more information. So if you find an issue that you like, but are not sure if you can handle it, you can communicate about your relevant skill levels and ask for more information about it. Then the maintainer can tell you if this issue will be a good fit for you or not, and might even point you to a more suitable issue. One good way to approach this is also to join the community behind the project, if there is one, and communicate their about your skills and ask for recommended issues!
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nullbrainshadow

detailed explanation.. and it's true in my case.
I am maintaining the forked version of Django JET (original maintainers archived it). then I updated jQuery and jQuery Ui library and synced with every django upgrade.
i am getting calls from companies whoever see my profile on LinkedIn.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Wow! That's so good to hear! Keep it up with the good work and thanks for sharing your experience on this!

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Alen Horvat

But how do we get acknowledgement and recognition for our skills and contributions? What if it was as easy as editing the CHANGELOG.md? Namely, repository owners could add a machine-readable file (e.g., yaml, json) to denote the different contributions of direct or indirect contributors. WDYT?

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

That's a great idea! For smaller repos I think that's perfect actually, now, for larger repos with thousands of contributors I think it can be a little impratical though.

A similar way to showcase that could be approached from the POV of a repository owner is to reference the people that helped in the release tag too!

Here's an example.

I'll edit the post to add this info because I think it's super relevant! Thanks for the comment @alenhorvat!

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Alen Horvat

By reading your post and doing some research I also found github.com/all-contributors/all-co...

We're also discussing with skills recognition/HR communities about adding skills acknowledgements: github.com/skillJot/git-recognise

git and git platforms represent a new opportunity to acknowledge skills and contributions in a transparent and verifiable manner. Does any of this make sense? :)

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zvone187

Being proactive in general will lead to success. Especially contributing, you're showcasing your skill, and more importantly, determination.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Determination is totally the keyword here! Thanks for the comment!

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Juraj Malenica

Nice stuff!

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Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini

I can relate!

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vincanger

Nice article! It's great to see that people are realizing that open-source has so many benefits, including helping you level up your skills and land you sweet jobs :)

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Anietie Brownson

I love this article
I used to think making contributions to open source had to be code only
Thanks for the tips

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Boby Tiwari

Great article ๐Ÿ’ฏ

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hsimah

This PR landed me on the desk of a Facebook recruiter. Nearly five years on I'm over in the US, still working here. Contributions count!

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

That is so awesome to hear! Awesome comment @hsimah!