Comment by wizzerking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wizzerking | Hacker News Reader

I am a 68 year old child of a navy family. Mostly far east, all over the USA, and some Europe.My advice from my life is combine your uniqueness into a single unit. Take your background and create an opensource project that can be done quickly 2 - 3 months max and after that is done use that to promote yourself if you want to be a developer/software engineer. If you are into DevOps or DevSecOps do challenges. Pursue what interests you. When Tensorflow and Pytorch were open sourced I started learning by reading Abstracts and posting those articles that interested me and provided code, to encourage more authors to provide code. Now there is paperswithCode, Neurohive and other such sites, but I still learn, and lots of public GitHub and GitLab repo's

Take what is unique about you, what interests you and

Please don't do a quick open source project for the sake of padding one's resume. The world is full of crap software as it is. Such software shows up in people's google searches, takes time to try out, and the user will inevitably find out that it's garbage (you can't do anything good in 2-3 months that wasn't done before if you're just learning) and not use it - but not before they wasted time to research it. Multiply it by say 10k users and you've done some serious harm in the world.

The way to go here is to absolutely code something, but not to pretend that it's a worthwhile project (e.g. don't release it under open source licence). If you put the code in a public repo somewhere so that interviers can see it, clearly state that it's just a learning excercise.

What about projects people made for fun and put it online because they're proud of it?

It's also common advice to put your portfolio online. They really don't show up in internet searches as far I've seen.

> Multiply it by say 10k users and you've done some serious harm in the world.

I would disagree.

While resume driven open source projects are indeed painful to sift through, you have no idea where these projects may lead to. We should not discourage people especially new devs from contributing. It should be upon experienced devs to learn how to quickly identify code that is worth exploring in more details. Like a year old project with no recent commits, maybe not worth looking further.

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