Dear Student Developer: Contribute to Open Source

I have been thinking about the open-source software (OSS) community for a long time now. As an active contributor and maintainer of OSS, I see it as one of the most important communities someone could join in software development. This is especially true for young programmers with limited experience. Whether self-taught or a freshman in college, I believe that joining an open-source community may be the most beneficial decision you can make on your journey. Working alone, even on a great idea, can’t compare to the experience you get from contributing to open-source.

I have been involved with one specific open-source community since 2022. One of the hardest things I’ve encountered is getting people to actually contribute to projects. Many joined the group, some even discussed ideas, but once the implementation phase began, most of them vanished. However, just joining a group isn’t enough. The only way to gain the full benefits of a community, beyond networking with like-minded people, is to actually contribute to the software that the community is building.

Early in my journey to becoming a software engineer, I joined a group of people on Discord who were building software and sharing the source code on GitHub. Anyone could join, and the projects were relatively beginner-friendly with a touch of professionalism, since many of the contributors were professional software engineers. By contributing to the project, I not only gained hands-on experience but also got to collaborate with other developers, receive direct feedback, and learn from seeing my code picked apart. That helped me understand what I did wrong, why it was wrong, and other ways to implement what I had written. It was a mutually beneficial experience. I contributed to their project, and their review contributed to my growth as a software engineer.

Looking back, that first contribution ended up having a bigger impact than I expected. One of the reasons I got my first internship as a second-year university student in computer science was that I could add that open-source contribution to my resume. Six months after my first contribution to OSS, I got an offer for my first internship at Uber as a software engineer. Part of it was because the project I had on my resume was this first contribution. It was the only software-related experience I had, but I believe it was enough to get visibility from recruiters and help me pass the technical interviews.

Since then, I’ve completed two internships as a software engineer, made many contributions to open-source software, as well as built my own open-source software to help others who were in the same situation as I was back when I started. I wish more people, especially students and early-career developers, could see the way I see it and start to be more interested in contributing to OSS. In my opinion, internships are not the only valuable form of experience in software engineering. If you’re dedicated and willing to collaborate with others, contributing to open source can be just as valuable as an internship.

That being said, I agree that finding a community could be challenging, especially with how cluttered GitHub is with projects. If you are a student reading this, please reach out. I can, and am willing to guide you to get your first contribution, whether that’s on one of the projects I’m building or within the community that helped me get this first exposure to OSS. You are not alone in your journey, and watching tutorials or doing school homework is not enough to make the cut in today’s very crowded software engineering job market.

Find me on GitHub: https://github.com/chrisdedman

My open-source org: https://github.com/sandbox-science

The org where I first contributed to OSS: https://github.com/Code-Society-Lab