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Tell me your story about how open source has impacted your career.
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opensource-career.md

I’m working on a talk about the relationship between community participation and careers, and want to hear from people who feel like open source has impacted their career. Tell me your story!

Below are some questions related to get you started. Feel free to either fork this gist, blog your answers and send me the link, or email them directly to me at bkeepers@github.com. I will ask your permission before sharing anything about your story publicly.

  • How do you feel your participation in open source has impacted your career, both good and bad?

  • Open source has had a greatly positive impact on my career. I believe my career opportunities have come from my contributions to open source with my interests and skills being public.

  • How did you first get exposed to open source? Why did you decide to learn more about it?

  • I believed in the importance of sharing knowledge but it wasn't until I started as a Code for America fellow that I realized it had a name, open source, and an active community. In my first week I learned how to use GitHub from other CfA fellows and my mind was blown with how much was out there. From then on I was learning from and working in open source.

  • Do you code? If so, were you a coder when you got started with open source? Why did you learn to code?

  • I do code. I'd always been interested in coding and dabbled in my spare time and in a few classes in school but never considered making a career of it. I learned to code during my year as a Code for America fellow because I was passionate about providing cities with better solutions and empowered by how these skills could produce solutions with a quick turn around (compared to what I'd seen inside of government).

  • How have you participated in open source communities beyond code? How?

  • I have mentored at workshops for learning Node or Git and GitHub.

  • How did you make the leap from casual bystander to participant? What was your biggest barrier to entry and how did you overcome it? Did you have any mentors or other support along the way?

  • The biggest barrier was to put everything I did, as imperfect or broken as it was, on GitHub. It took encouragement from friends to get over that, and I eventually did because I agreed that there was no "perfection" standard before putting something on GitHub and that everything can be learned from by someone in some way.

  • How satisfied are you with your career right now?

  • I'm really thankful that through open source I've been able to change careers, build out ideas I've had and meet the inspiring people I have who are building incredible tools.

  • What advice do you wish you could give your younger self?

  • I wouldn't change much about my path to open source development. I believe my experience in government and in urban design contribute meaningfully to how I build software and would go the same route again.

  • (optional) What gender and ethnicity/race do you identify as?

  • Caucasian female.

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