Leveraging Open Source to boost your career in Tech

Leveraging Open Source to boost your career in Tech

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J3bitok
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4 min read

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Several weeks ago we hosted one of our SpaceYaTech Admins Catherine Kiiru, who is a software developer, technical writer, and avid open-source contributor to come take our community through everything open-source from what is open-source, why open-source, how to get started, and some communities you can join to contribute to open-source and some paid open-source opportunities. Towards the end of the session, we had our Data Scientist friend Brayan Kai who is passionate about creating open-source projects that can impact the rural areas we come from like him he’s from Kilifi County and was asking us all to think of wherever we come from and with the tech skill, we have at the moment how can still impact or make the data related to those areas for examples those of farmers well organized and made use of. Introduce coding schools and educational resources that impact young people especially the unemployed in these areas and also considering we live in the 21st century

The host of the space was Fred Ouko and Catherine Kiiru was the main speaker and the other speakers were Sharon Jebitok, Brian Kai Mwanyumba, Spencer Ochieng, Mark Gatere and Fatime HijabiCoder shout out to all of them for sharing their experience contributing to open-source and guiding those who want to get started.

In this article I’m going to share some key tips and resources that were:

How to Contribute to Open-Source

  • through GitHub issues, tutorials, and documentation which are learning content that users and instructors will use.
  • contributing to open-source isn’t only via code but also as a designer i.e branding or product design, technical instructor, and technical writer by writing articles, case studies or data collection, etc.

Benefits of Contributing to Open-Source

  • it acts as a booster to your resume and it improves your GitHub profile as a developer or designer
  • grows your portfolio having contributed to real-world projects
  • enhances your credibility and capability to solve real-world projects
  • improves collaborative & social skills in day-to-day job contributing remotely
  • acts as a good way to network and referral for job opportunities from open-source project maintainers and fellow contributors
  • improves chances of being hired by a company maintaining the open-source as a developer/designer

How to find Open-Source Projects to Contribute to

  • join communities of open-source projects for example Google has a lot of open-source products
  • acknowledge the most paid Open-Source opportunities like project-based open-source software which are short-term and don’t compromise your schedule

Paid Open-Source Opportunities

OS communities

Join Open-Source communities and start contributing

How to Position Yourself for Open-Source

  • endure you're visible
  • contribute beyond the actual work
  • be active in forums & conversations
  • volunteer to host meetups, live events, etc
  • work on open-source projects that incorporate frontend & backend they will be helpful in understanding and getting good with the interview process as well as boosting your resume

Get Started

  • Github Explore
  • Kenyan Health IT System
  • Familiarize yourself with projects or technologies you work with for example VS Code and React.js. Also, most programming languages are open-source you can start contributing to them

Open-Source Projects Hiring Locally

  • Canonical
  • Ushahidi - Kenyan

Let’s build open-source! Follow SpaceYaTech](https://linktr.ee/spaceyatech) on Twitter and join our discord server lets push the conversation!💪🚀

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