unpublished alpha

Act like an open source expert.

Do you ever feel like you’re just a cog in the corporate machine?

Like the work you do gets swallowed up into a black box, never to see the light of day?

As mission-driven professionals, many of us crave the ability to contribute something positive to the world through our skills and labor.

Open source provides the perfect outlet to channel that desire while supercharging your career development. By contributing code, documentation, training, or other assets to community-driven projects, you can be a part of solving large-scale coordination problems that impact millions of users worldwide.

The beauties of open source are in its transparency, collaboration, and inclusiveness. All activity happens right out in the open for anyone to study, learn from, and build upon. You get a literal open book into how elite developers and product thinkers approach hard problems.

For those with more community-oriented drives, getting involved in open source governance bodies lets you flex vital leadership muscles around herding and stakeholder management. And due to open source’s inherent transparency, any quality contributions allow you to build a concrete, public portfolio that turbocharges career opportunities. React developer Dan Abramov famously landed a job at Netlify based off his influential open source work.

The magic of open source extends beyond just technology too. Commons-based peer production models are now being experimentally applied in everything from science to journalism to policy-making. By contributing mind and labor to these public arenas, you can leave a dent that impacts the trajectory of entire industries and disciplines.

So if you find yourself professionally dissatisfied and craving more meaning from your work, look no further than open source. There’s truly a whole universe of large-scale coordination problems waiting to be unstuck by your unique talents and experience. Writing these thoughts publicly is (the start of?) my opensource contribution.

Moving forward, regardless of the type of work you do, embrace open source principles: transparency, collaboration, early releases, inclusivity, and community engagement.