6 basic skills for landing your open-source dream

Mark Atwood, head of HP's Open Source Engagement division, published a message entitled "How to Get One of These Awesome Open Source http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/16696" in a student-facing speech. html "> Jobs, some of which are more suitable for those who want to work as a classmate in open source projects.Atwood said that if you are committed to open source business, then you are contributing to the world.

Below we summarize Atwood's advice and hopefully encourage job seekers who want to work in the open source community.

Communication skills

In addition to verbal communication, communication skills require clear written communication skills. Think about it, if you write something that someone needs to take over, rewrite, you simply do not get the feedback you want. The most important language is not programming language, but English. As much as possible, no harm. The other is in more occasions to practice expression skills: call, conference, or even send a message must pay attention to the table clear.

2. Technical ability

A lot of things in open source projects are relatively scattered, that is to say you need to have at least two programming languages: Python and JavaScript. The benefits of Python are easy to learn and easy to read. The main reason you need JavaScript is that it is the most widely used. In addition, Atwood also advises you to learn a new language every 6-12 months. Finally you have to learn to use the debugger, as well as distributed source control.

3 and colleagues

"Open source is about working with a community."

You can start with this community, go through meetings or communicate with Meetup.com to search for workers, clubs, school clubs, etc. in the industry, or even larger project groups to learn about their projects and technologies. The best way is to attend some meetings or events, face to face communication will be better.

4. Find a job before doing the project

Seriously, it is best to take part in some open source projects before looking for a job. Register your email list, join the Stack Overflow discussion community, read other people's questions and answers, and try answering questions yourself. There is not to hurry to fix the bug, first understand what the bug is to fix it later.

Joining an open source project before looking for a job can exercise your skills and increase your credibility, and in the open source world fame is crucial.

Teamwork

If you're lucky, you may work with developers all over the world to work with them on open source tools. You may also need to be familiar with IRC, bug trackers and email lists, and use git to learn pull requests and log comments, all of which are important skills. The other is to master the code review, pair programming and other skills are essential, they allow you to become more intelligent, so you find yourself in the code.

6. Personal reputation

In the open source community, you need people to know what you are doing and what your expertise is. So you have to create a demo of your own work that contains your email information, project submissions, and other contributions. If the boss sees the open source project in your resume, he will definitely give you a project with a heavier weight level. Second is to update your contact information at any time, do not let others spend a lot of time to find you.

Write in the end

Atwood finally suggested that we live to learn the old, the technology is more than pressure.