Open Source is the biggest internship
Open source got my first really income when i was just 19. 3000$ in India was a big deal trust me. I’ll tell you a bit about my journey before i tell you the benefits
When I was introduced to the world of open source I never thought it would be such a huge feather in my cap. I came across Google Summer of Code in my second year of undergrad back in 2018, I was pretty bullish on my chances back then. I remember the first organization that I applied to was coala which was an open source linter. Undoubtely I got rejected, not having enough experience nor knowledge to make a meaningful impact.
I tried again the next year to apply, this time to a different organization, you might have heard of this one called Jenkins, the popular CI/CD tool. However I did not make the same mistakes I made the first time, I worked super hard on my pull requests and engaged early on. This time I got selected and it was a really special feeling, ill probably write about it in the future.
From this moment onwards I got invovled with numerous initatives over the years like I was involved in the Kubernetes Release team, as well as with the Linux Foundation on a Mainframe Project. Furthermore I had a chance to participate in Major League Hacking on the nvm project which was super fun. The more I write about it the more I think it deserves its own blogpost. Noted it down in my to-do list.
The upsides of contributing
- Its all in the open which means visibility to recruiters or hiring managers if your looking for a job
- Great experience on actual production codebases, most of these OSS projects are being used by thousands of people and delevopers.
- OSS programs like GSOC and MLH are recognized over the world giving you great learning and even valuable experience.