This week (28.05.2013) I've attended an interesting event, called “Call of the Guru”, that was held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University. The idea was to get a group of IT professionals (gurus) to talk to young students on topics related to work, academia, start-up and open source.
Images from RadoRado's Place and
SofiaValley.
Check their event reviews as well.
In another post I've already shared my thoughts on future IT jobs. Here I will talk about what open source means for students.
Why hack open source
That's the number one question students will ask. The answer is simple
It gives you experience and you become a hacker!
There is absolutely no way one could graduate in their early 20s, not work during study and have 3-5 years of experience as required by many job offers. Unless one hacks open source.
- Open source is real world, not a play project. There are many interesting problems to be solved; There's always work to be done;
- Complex software teaches you software design/architecture patterns;
- Larger projects like Linux distributions can also teach you about software release cycle and release processes;
- You work with a team, which drives you forward and you gain experience;
- You learn to be patient as your work is reviewed by others and mistakes pointed out;
- Larger projects use several different languages so you learn them; or alternatively hack on different projects;
- You communicate - via email and IRC mostly but that teaches you communication skills. To see the difference between how educated people talk and how politicians talk listen to this video;
- You make friends and connections which may benefit you later in your career;
- Many open source companies recruit right from the community. I know lots of people who landed their dream job by hacking for fun.
As a student, if you can afford not getting a job it's better to use your time on open source projects. This is what I did as a young student and a junior developer. The rest is history!
What to do
There are many things one can do in open source - write code, test software and find bugs, write automated test cases, translate to local languages, design user interfaces and project websites, maintain wiki articles, provide help to users on forums or IRC channels, help organize events, etc. All of this is respected in the community and gives credibility.
Where to start
If you haven't already read How To Become A Hacker by Eric Raymond you should do so right away. Then come back and finish this article.
For those who'd like to start coding but have no idea where to start take a look at OpenHatch.
OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.
If you still like to be a developer but don't feel confident enough to hack on the core of the project I'd recommend you start by writing automated test cases. Writing test cases doesn't require much previous experience in programming and lets you explore and learn the internals of the software you're testing. With that knowledge you will become more confident and start writing on the core features if you like. I am myself a QA but regularly contribute patches to software I test because I know how it works or why it doesn't and it's easy for me to fix it.
If you'd better start as a translator check Transifex. It's used by both commercial and open source entities and has become the de-facto standard in open source translation tools. Btw the entire Transifex company was build after trying to solve a particular problem in the Fedora Project and they are an open source company.
For general news about open source check OpenSource.com.
Have questions? I have answers
Don't hesitate to ask me anything about open source and/or how to get involved with it. I will gladly share my experience (learned the hard-way in the old days) or point you to other folks who may know more on the topic.
Comments !