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About open source projects - Is it useful for career?

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Anonymous User at Taro Communitya year ago

Hi guys I wanted to ask your opinion on open source on GitHub and how valuable having a solid portfolio of contributions there can be.

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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    a year ago

    About open source projects - Is it useful for career?

    In short: Yes. A lot of engineers get hired due to their open-source contributions: Back at Meta, we would reach out to external folks contributing to our major libraries to see if they want to work at Meta. Open-source is both good for jobs and building up your skills. However, there's a lot of nuance to this.

    Having a meaningful open-source portfolio is hard, especially if you're a more junior engineer. It's not just something you can just pick up and have hiring managers come knocking on your door the next month. The major repos (i.e. the ones you want to work on to get the most attention) have massive, complicated codebases that can take weeks, if not months, to really learn.

    I talk about all this more in-depth here: "What technologies or stacks should I create a project to add in my resume for entry level software jobs?"

    To be 100% honest, contributing to other folks' open-source is too daunting for me, haha. Just going through the giant READMEs is so scary. This is why I just do side projects instead (and I open-source the code): How To REALLY Level Up Your Coding Ability With Side Projects

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    Founder at TinyBase, ex-Eng Director at Meta
    2 months ago

    We just put out a new course about this. I think the answer is yes! - but the course covers some of the nuance around what might work, and what you should expect.

    Enjoy! https://www.jointaro.com/course/become-an-open-source-master/

GitHub is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. 

Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. It is commonly used to host open source software development projects
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