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How To List FOSS Experience On Your Resume
maximus1 writes "If you're selling skills gained in an open source project, you have additional opportunities to shine, say experts in this ITWorld article. But what is the best way to explain your FOSS experience? 'Someone stands out because of how they talk about the project, says Zack Grossbart, author of The One Minute Commute. His advice is to describe the project and discuss your contributions in detail: 'If you were a committer, what did you do to earn that status? What features did you work on? Did you design new areas, or just implement predefined functions? Did you lead meetings? Define new architecture? Set the project direction?' If the FOSS experience is part of your background but not a shining beacon or job equivalent, it's common to list it under 'other experience.' Andy Lester, author of Land The Tech Job You Love, says: 'Think of each project as a freelance job that you've worked on. Just as different freelance gigs have varying sizes and scopes, so too does each project to which you contribute. The key is to not lump all your projects under one "open source work" heading.' Good examples are worth a thousand words. Grossbart offers up his resume as a sound but not perfect example (PDF) that includes open source experience. (His article on how to format your resume might also be of interest.)"
Make a portfolio of open source work you've done. Go in and extract code that you've written. Annotate it explaining what problem you were solving and why you chose the design you did, etc. Keep each section fairly short (a few hundred lines of code) and write an overall document linking up the various code excerpts, creating a narrative for them to follow. If you have planning/design documentation, etc feel free to show excerpts of that too. Even emails from mailing lists where you defused a potentially difficult situation is good. Finally, provide links to all the original projects that you've contributed to so they can see your contribution first hand.
After you have organized all that, put it up on a web page somewhere and put a link on your resume. Burn a few business card sized CDs and hand them out at interviews. Make sure to bring a few to each interview. I've found they are popular.
This has gotten me more than one job. I used to maintain my portfolio continuously on my web page, but I'm teaching now and have let it lapse. However, it's sometimes useful even outside the job searching venue.
Some FOSS projects (especially those sponsored by a company, like Red Hat's Archer project) have regular meetings via phone calls in order to discuss the status of the activities, decide about new features, etc. As a positive side effect, it makes the developers interact more with each other and create a stronger connection between them.