FOSS Benefits to Your Career
An Excerpt from Forge Your Future with Open Source—by VM (Vicky) Brasseur
Many people in technology forget that software isn’t the only thing that needs developing; their careers do, too. While your managers and mentors can help here, your career development is your responsibility. It’s up to you to make sure you’re always learning and moving your career in a direction that makes the best sense for your goals and needs.
Free and open source software can be invaluable here. At work, you learn and use the technologies and architectures that are required for work projects. These technologies may help pay the bills but may not be what you need to move your career in the direction you want. FOSS, however, offers you endless options for technologies and architectures. Once you determine your goals, you can turn to FOSS to see which projects will help you reach them.
Public Portfolio
Your contributions to free and open source software projects become a public portfolio of your skills and how you’ve advanced them over the years. As you start contributing to projects, start a log or portfolio for tracking all of your contributions. Don’t simply rely on the projects’ version control systems and hosting providers, as those can change. If you don’t keep your own log of contributions, you can easily lose track of the smaller but still important contributions you make to projects. Finally, maintaining your own portfolio allows you to track those types of contribution that can’t appear in a version control system, such as acting as a volunteer coordinator at a community event or mentoring new contributors. Maintaining your own record of all types of contributions makes it very easy to share your contribution portfolio with prospective employers.
Portfolio as Resume?
It is important to stress, however, that despite what many in our industry would like to believe, at no point does this portfolio of FOSS contributions replace a resume; it supplements it. A curriculum vitae (CV) or resume shows prospective employers two things: what you’ve done for past professional positions and what difference you made with those actions. This last point — the difference you made — is very important to communicate to prospective employers. They don’t want new team members who have simply done things. They want team members who have done the right things, for the right reasons, and moved the entire team and company forward in some way: someone who made a difference.
While your resume will show your potential employer what you’ve done, your portfolio reveals how you did it. This is important, of course, but it’s not as important as the what. That’s because every team has its own particular preference for the how. Your portfolio may show them that you can create effective technical documentation for multiple audiences, but your resume will show them that your documentation reduced contact to the company call center, saving tens of thousands of dollars in support representative time in the first year alone. Therefore, don’t give in to the trend to replace your resume with a portfolio. By preparing both, you’ll make a strong and positive impact on potential employers.
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