Open source offers opportunities to practice leadership and management skills, such as resolving conflicts, organizing teams of people, and prioritizing work. Build public artifacts that help you grow a reputation (and a career)īy definition, all of your open source work is public, which means you get free examples to take anywhere as a demonstration of what you can do. The acts of learning and teaching can be a fulfilling activity for everyone involved. Working with others on a shared project means you’ll have to explain how you do things, as well as ask other people for help. Many people form lifelong friendships through their participation in open source, whether it’s running into each other at conferences or late night online chats about burritos. Open source projects with warm, welcoming communities keep people coming back for years.

Meet people who are interested in similar things Whether it’s coding, user interface design, graphic design, writing, or organizing, if you’re looking for practice, there’s a task for you on an open source project. If that’s the case, then contributing the patch back is the best way to ensure that your friends (and yourself when you update to the next release) will be able to benefit from it. When you find a bug in an open source software you use, you may want to look at the source to see if you can patch it yourself.

Lots of open source contributors start by being users of software they contribute to. Why do people contribute to open source? Plenty of reasons! Improve software you rely on “Why I love contributing to open source software”Ĭontributing to open source can be a rewarding way to learn, teach, and build experience in just about any skill you can imagine. I think working on open source projects helps me as much as it helps the project! Working on helped me earn many of the skills I later used for my studies in university and my actual job.

Projects on java with source code