After some years of working in different positions and lots of projects, you will realize that you tend to specialisation and that is difficult to get new projects.
For example, when I joint my current company, my profile was very sysadm oriented, and it was kind of hard to prove I’m not a bad programmer (IMHO, I started programming when I was 13).
When you do that thing you’re known to do well, you’ll be more focused to do it again and again. Call it ultra-specialisation or just “you’ve been typecasted”.
Just in case you want to change your role a little bit, you’ll see that it’s very difficult, because your CV shows you as hardcore sysadm. Then it’s when open source software can help you in your career.
About two months ago I realized that I’ve never been a significant contributor for any open source project. I’ve submitted small patches every now and then, but nothing noticeable that I could highlight in my CV. Although I’ve been programming for almost 20 years of my life, to different degrees of programming, I don’t have enough stuff to prove that I can program professionally in some areas (OK, may be bogom; but it’s small and with little interest right now).
So I started to look for a interesting project to be involved in, for at least 4 hours a week, and contribute as much as I can so I can fix that gap in my CV.
Finally, my target is Cherokee, and I’ve started to work hard in reading the code, and I’ve been successful fixing two small bugs that required deep code reading (aka 1 hour of code reading though the tree to write a two line fix).
I think I’ll be comfortable with the code in a pair of weeks, so I will need less that 4 hours week to be productive (but I like it, so I wouldn’t mind spending more time hacking on it heh).
What do you think? Is this a good idea to improve your CV?
