Open Source Jobs

[Austin]

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 12:40 -0400, Adam Raymond wrote:
> Thanks allot, I really want to try and get some experience early so I
> can be ahead of the game in collage/university. I know its really hard
> to get placed in something, you need a family member who works in the
> industry. Also with school, they don't work during weekends or
> anything. But I want to be involved with that actual development of a
> Linux distro. the projects seem so much fun.

Well, if you just want some
practice/experience/something-that-looks-cool, I'd suggest either
writing a small application, or joining a volunteer-based distro.

Writing your own app is easy, because there are so many things missing
in linux... little things.  I'd suggest learning perl or python because
they are easy to understand, portable (windows too), and quick to
develop with.  Plus, they both have easy-to-use GUI bindings (tk, gtk,
qt, etc.).  For example, I wrote two apps I needed myself.  One got
picked up by Mandrakelinux and became part of their core setup utils
(Drakroam), and the other didn't so I just put it up on freshmeat (it's
called Tabatha).  I've got some good feedback about it too.  I'm working
on a third one to control my MP3 player.  If you're working on something
you can use yourself, you tend to put way more time into it!

If you're not ready to start coding, there are several distros that are
community based.  Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo are some I can
think of immediately.  They always need packagers... deb, rpm, and
ebuilds are all easy to learn.  They also need documenters, which is a
great way to get your name on important documents.  Finally, you can
always help out on the 'help' departments, like Mandrakeclub, the Gentoo
forums, or the ubuntu mailing list, just answering questions.  If you're
really into operating system design, Mandrake will even let you hack
away on the core utilities (if you know perl).  
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/wiki

I have no computer science education at all, yet I have tons of cool
stuff to put on my CV, I've spoken at conferences, I've been sent to
France for free, and I've seen several back doors open into the IT
industry.  So you're right, education is only half of what you need to
be happy and successful.

Austin

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml