HACKER Q&A
📣 the_only_law

Include trivial open source contributions on resume?


I have a few contributions to decently know open source projects I've done. They're pretty minor, but do fix some issues.

I'm wondering if its worth putting on my resume. As of right now its pretty bare, with mostly just uninteresting work experience, no education, credentials or anything else of note.


  👤 toast0 Accepted Answer ✓
From my experience, when people look at your resume and ask questions about it, they want to hear a reasonable story with details available.

When those stories are all kind of 'well, I just did this tiny thing', it's off putting. But if your listing is more of a project with the components you used and you indicate you contributed to some of them, then you can tell the story of the project, and how it used that component anr show your knowledge of that component and that you fixed a couple things here and there. And talk about your process to identify the problem, find the source, collaborate with upstream etc. Following the interviewers interest to detail the parts they want to talk about.


👤 mtmail
A link to your github (or similar) username has a value, it will set you apart from others. What I'm looking for in your issues or PRs for example would be the written communication, not everybody can write good readable bug reports, and if the contribution guidelines of the project were followed which shows that you read the documentation before contributing.

As negative example: I read a CV where somebody linked four github pull requests. Two of them were closed unmerged by the project owner, one even had a remark that the code in question was copied from another website (which can get open source projects in trouble license-wise). I can't explain why the person willingly linked to bad examples of their work.


👤 bjourne
You don't have to link to specific pull requests but mentioning that you have contributed to this and that project is definitely worthwhile.