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I recently read How To Get Hired, a short, pragmatic article about getting into the programming field by someone who has done plenty of hiring.

I thought it had a lot of good points, and it got me to thinking: perhaps it’s time to get involved with an open source project.

I know, the semi-mythical idea behind the open source community is that individuals work on stuff because they are passionate about it, they work for free, etc, etc. While there are certainly many who do, there are also a great many who work for some corporation or another, and are paid to contribute to a certain OSS application because the company wants to use it, and therefore has a vested interest in the application’s improvement.

So the idea of working on an open source project from primarily “selfish” motives — ie, as a way to put some real-world project experience on a resume — is not so antithetical as it might sound at first. It ought to be a “win-win” proposition; the would-be coder is planning on using this experience as a reference, so he or she is interested in making submissions of the highest possible quality. The project benefits by having yet another coder submit their best, and the coder benefits by being able to say, I have worked on Project XYZ, doing this, that, the other.

Sounds like a good idea, then. So for the next while, I’ll be looking for a project. I’m still deliberating on what sort of project I’m wanting to get involved with, but here are a few thoughts so far.

1) Java. Given my motivation — to get some work experience — choosing a project based on, in, or around Java would seem to be the logical choice. It isn’t necessarily my first choice of languages I’d really prefer to work with, but I’m trying to be pragmatic. From a work experience perspective, it seems very unlikely that time spent coding production Java code would be wasted time.

2) Enterprise use. Again, finding an application that is in actually use by large organizations would seem to be a good choice. I haven’t done a great deal of research yet, but projects like JBoss or Hibernate (which is itself a JBoss project, IIRC) would seem to stand out in this space.

Like I said, I’m still deliberating. Groovy also seems interesting, as it combines some pragmatic skills (Java) with some that may be more interesting (scripting languages, Ruby & Python-like features). I guess I’ll keep looking around, for now.