This is one of the question which is often asked by many students or professionals who have not contribute to any communities before. In this section we will see how it can help students to crack during initial interview and how it will help professionals in long run.

Work on Live Projects

Open source projects are used by many others outside our college or offices. Think of Mozilla Firefox its used by millions of users, if a small bug is fixed by you, think of the amount of happens you will get when your code is working in millions of machines. Assume you are writing OpenAPI specs for the REST API or AsyncAPI Specs, think if you can contribute to Spec definition (Async Conference is happening and there is session for it, you can join freely) and used by thousands of companies , how proud you can be. Working in Live open source projects will teach you lot of things outside your comfort zone. Some of my experience how contributing helped me in my day job

• I write clean and optimized code for the project I work at office. (Thanks to code sheriff's from Mozilla)
• I introduced code reviewing in my team(learned when I contributed to Firefox os as reviewer)
• I started splitting client and server team working module ( learned from contributing to moz amo backend / front end, first time I saw there before in our office)
• I introduced what is unit testing ( learned from contributing to web-ext)
• I saw Live CI/CD (in AsyncAPI Website project)

What is that extra "wow" in your resume ?

When we are finishing our college graduate and sit for on campus placements, most of the students resume looks similar. There wont be any big difference among students, everyone might have done the projects / assignments given by the college, mostly they can answer the questions when they get from the subjects they have done, so at the end there wont be any much difference. Contributing to Open source will give a slight upper hand during the final stages of interview, as you will be working in the Live projects which are used by many.

Meeting "awesome" people & can have fun

There are different types of people you can meet and learn large number of things from them.

In the above image, the right most (red T-shirt) is myself, the next person is one of my close friend Trishul who teaches me lot in front-end related stuffs and he is also goto guy for me whenever I am struck with any decision. The Black hoodie guy Jai who is Co-founder of Deepsource. You can learn small things from everyone and at the same time you can have lots of fun, the other image is after the Over-night hackathon for Firefox Webextensions.

Get Public Recognition

Generally humans love to get recognized for the work they have done. Some of them don't think about it but many many love it when they get. Think in office or college, these recognition happens among the close set of peers, there can be very less chance it will be made public. In Open source world the recognition happens publicly and it is not in closed environment; usually it will happen either in blog or mailing list which will accept as proof for long time. I got recognized as Friend of Add-ons , on Apr 18 2018 for my long time contribution to Mozilla Add-ons Community.

Even most recently (Sep 2021), I got mentioned in one of the tweet by AsynAPI contributor for pushing a discussion.

Every small things matters a lot in open source communities.

Final thoughts

Well this post is written based on my experience, and its very limited. Open source communities are very big and large number of projects are available. I am listing very few which I contribute Actively or have contributed previously. You can check more, and to motivate you this month (Oct 2021), Hacktoberfest is happening. You can check in github and gitlab for the projects who are participating and start your journey. You can easily find out projects and task you can work and get started with community. To name few of my Favorite open source projects

• Mozilla
• Gitlab
• AsyncAPI Spec
• Appwrite
• Wikimedia
• Huggingface

Why you are waiting for now, just Dive Into Open source