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Using Your Open-Source Contributions To Land a Full-Time Job
Nerval's Lobster writes So you've worked on an open-source project, and you want to leverage that experience to move your career forward. In theory, there's no reason an employer should shun your experience, just because you did the project from home on your own time. But how can you actually leverage that project contribution into a full-time gig (assuming you want one, of course)? Developer Jeff Cogswell offers some tips: First, make sure that any project you present on your resume is a good one; pointy-haired bosses have a nasty habit of attribute the less-than-stellar elements of a project to you, even if you weren't responsible for them. Second, be prepped to talk about deadlines, bug reports and fixes just as if the project were something you'd done for a job instead of just the pleasure of contributing to something cool. Those are just a few of the ways to use open source to your advantage, but others abound.
I got my job offers thanks to my OSS project, including rather spammy google requirement mails.
As the sole author I got swamped with feature request and bug reports, which lead me to a policy of pretty much ignoring or closing with no comments anything I knew I wouldn't be working on immediately.
So don't worry about maillinglists showing you don't provide stellar support, since that's bound to seem lacking and hopefully you're not applying for a position where you need to deal with that kind of boring stuff.
pointy-eared bosses have a nasty habit of attribute the less-than-stellar elements of a project to you, even if you weren't responsible for them.
Damn those elven bosses!!
Protip: It's pointy-haired boss.
Thanks for the informative post, Dice.com guy!!