Ask HN: Open source developers, how do you find time for contributions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Open source developers, how do you find time for contributions?

11 pointstuyguntn11 comments

Hi HNers,

I see lots of places require github profile when applying to job, if you don't have one, just -1 point. They are asking for demonstrable skills or work. If you are just an average developer, who get things done, then again -1 probably.

If your products are open source, then it is okay to show your contributions, but if you mostly work in closed source environments, how do you find time to contribute or create open source?

I have family and children, it is very difficult to work again after work, because family definitely needs your care.

UPD: Why I am writing this? Even though I have full time job now, we are struggling to be cash flow positive, which might require to find another job in coming months. I applied for around 30+ jobs, but mostly no answer or rejection without giving any feedback or reason for rejection. But young devs with some past github contributions are doing just fine (I wish them luck of course :) no offense here, just giving info ).

There are people with jobs, families, and other hectic schedules that still walk their dogs, attend clubs, mow their lawns, put up Holiday lights, have hobbies, even volunteer.

What I'm against is this crab mentality and envy that having contributions to open source is looked upon as if it's yacht sailing - when it's really hard work and quite thankless, heh.

I highly doubt every time I hear people saying "they don't have time", the person truly optimizes their schedule to be productive, or has forgone common "normal" timewasters.

Every time someone is playing video games, chatting, using social media, watching TV, and having spent on nothing productive: that is when open source can happen. You can do a lot in an hour of time.

If you look at my open source contributions (to other projects), more than half are:

- updating continuous integration / tests

- code styling

- documentation

- typos

How much time does it take to fix a typo? 1 minute.

To improve documentation? 5-25 minutes.

Code styling? 1 minute to 1 hour.

Updating CI? 10 minutes to 1 hour.

Those are all great stepping stones to help you gain momentum, instead of malingering with no direction. Nobody is going to come along and volunteer on your behalf, this is about your personal constitution.

A lot of my other patches come from work. In the natural course of duty, there's opportunity to send code back upstream.

My largest contributions span 2 days or more.

I've seen stuff like simple typos that would be really quick to fix in some open source projects, but then I start wondering if it's just going to be seen as one of those "cheap" contributions and choose to leave it. Having never contributed to open source, I sort of feel like I should prove my worth by contributing something that takes a bit more effort before feeling comfortable going for the lowest hanging of fruit (I don't mean a huge feature or anything, but maybe something that involves some actual coding vs a typo in documentation or in a variable name). Typing it out I realize this sounds kind of silly...

If you don’t start somewhere then you never start.

I for one would love to have someone that followed me around and cleaned up my mess. Why would you discount that as a contribution?

Even when working in closed source environments there is some open source project you will use.

Liked it? Disliked it? Go to github, check their issue list. Most projects have beginner picks, grab one, solve it. Invest 30 minutes a week, and you'll have a solid, steady contribution showing on github.

Contributing is often a matter of minutes, and should be driven by your needs. That helps a lot.

I picked up Go and started contributing to Terraform providers because I use Terraform at work, and it's interesting. Side bonus, now I can fix all issues on my own and submit PRs to make them disappear for others.

For info: it's not a time issue. I run my own company, I have children, I am single parenting, I exercise daily, and enjoy a few leisure activities.

Are you sure that they're weighting FLOSS contributions that heavily? At the first application stage I wouldn't expect them to look at them much so I'm not sure if your extrapolation from your rejections is accurate.

> I'm not sure if your extrapolation from your rejections is accurate.

sure, it maybe wrong, maybe not. I just provided additional information to the context.

I was an active contributor to a number of popular open-source projects and a maintainer of a couple of my own. Nobody cares TBH unless the position you're applying for requires that particular project you've worked on. And even then some companies don't bother to answer. HN's "Who is hiring" has the lowest reply ratio BTW.

I maintain my Ruby side-project for years and I opensourced some self contained parts of it (e.g. an extension to nginx), also contributed fixes to libs I use. Over the years they got some stars, tickets etc.

Although some people get impressed that I do some meaningful side stuff I think networking is much more important factor which helps me find a job. Especially in unrelated closed source envs, like enterprise Java.

So I would suggest to talk with influential tech people around you, learn from them, stay in touch when they change job. Ask what they do, do they need help with their projects etc. And if you are good they should be happy to recommend you at their places.

Very little of what I write is so specialized that no part of it involves anything that might be useful in different contexts. Some parts, yes, of course. When I see something I'd like to use again and again in different contexts, I implement that component as a module.

By publishing a module as FLOSS, it becomes extremely simple to install. And these modular components join the grand, continually evolving chain of FLOSS tools.

At first it was kind of a nuisance to go through this process. Now it's almost automatic, and very fast and easy. What I found useful to me might be useful to others some day.

I neglect personal and avocational responsibilities for days at a time.

I don't contribute to open source. Never had any bearing on job applications. I do have a github but its mostly little experiments from curiosity.

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