Linus Torvalds, Yukihiro Matsumoto, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Larry Wall. They're all famous software developers
you may have heard of. If you haven't heard of them, surely you know about some of their creations:
Linux, Ruby, Rails, and Perl.
Checking the
Rails core alumni list, I had heard of half of them
before I knew they were ever Rails team members.
You know other names as well - many inside what you might consider your core community, and probably several
outside of it.
Even if these developers weren't trying to do so, they
did a fantastic job of marketing themselves. As Chad Fowler notes in this week's chapter of
MJWTI,
Anyone can write Struts or Nant on their
résumé. Very few can write Struts committer or Nant committer.
When thinking about marketing yourself as a programmer, keep that in mind. In other words, it's not just
about the fame from a hugely successful project you started, or the love from all the sexy kittens who
know your name.
Simply having participated in the project shows not only your passion for software
development, but also that you're well versed in the technology you intend to use. You helped develop it, after all.
My own experience in this sphere has been limited, but it's something I hope to rectify.
I have released a couple of projects, to little fanfare, but since then, I've been wanting to work on projects that someone else started, because being responsible for
the
life of the project is something I'm just not interested in at the moment.
In pursuit of that goal, at the beginning of the year,
I resolved to get more involved in OSS
(among other things), and for a couple of weeks I actually stuck to it. But once school started I quickly
realized that there just wasn't enough time to do everything I wanted, and open source contributions were
some of the first to go.
Another limitation was that while I wanted to work on JRuby, I wasn't using it for any major projects
(just many small scripting tasks) - so
I couldn't even help in the most obvious way of filing bug reports. However, now I'm working on a Ruby on Rails
application that we expect to deploy on .NET using IronRuby, so I may get some good opportunities to help
on that project, even if just by a little.
These are all baby steps. I expect to get more involved in the future, even if in small ways to various projects that
never lead to "committer" status.
Aside from
learning by being the worst and just
saving your job by practicing it,
you can also
market yourself through your involvement in open source projects.
I know a lot of you already have your own projects and collaborate or participate in others. Perhaps you
can help answer the concerns of everyone else.
For the rest of you, here are a few questions for discussion:
- What are you waiting for? Is there a way you can help your favorite project this weekend? It will make you
a better developer than reading this blog will, that's for sure. =)
-
Do you feel too intimidated to start, or just don't know how?
-
If you don't participate, why not?
Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post
or short blurb RSS feed? I'm so confident you'll love my smelly pasta plate
wisdom that I'm offering a no-strings-attached, lifetime money back guarantee!
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