Re: [PLUG] Volunteering

[Douglas Muth <doug.muth@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Mag Gam <magawake@gmail.com> wrote:
> My friend has been looking for a IT job for the last 1.5 year and its
> been an up hill battle ever since. She submitted more than 100+
> resumes and had some interviews but to no avail. She understands she
> does not have a lot of programming experience (she is coming from the
> business side) but would like to step into it since she enjoys it. I
> told her volunteering to an opensource project would be ideal but I
> too am confused what would be a good project to volunteer.
>
[snip]

Someone else mentioned getting on GitHub, I too recommend that.

I know the Drupal CMS (drupal.org) is also very friendly to folks who
contribute code for their modules, and anyone can write and submit a
third-party module to the project.  That may be worth looking into.
(Plenty of docs at http://api.drupal.org/ as well)

There's also a quote about open source software "being written to
scratch an itch that a developer had", and I would encourage your
friend to write software that they personally might find useful, and
share it on GitHub (and Google Code, too, come to think of it).  Even
if it's not a major project, being able to tell employers in an
interview that they wrote and maintain an open source project, as well
as having code for the employer to look over, is a big differentiator.

To provide a real life example, we've interviewed roughly two dozen
candidates for engineering positions at my current job.  Not one
person has provided a substantial amount of open source code for us.
The first person who does, will succeed in differentiating themselves
from all the other candidates. (Yes, that's a hint to folks here.
We're hiring for LAMP positions. Contact me offlist for more info.)

-- Doug
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