From Open-Source Community Involvement to Career

At first I thought I had somehow won the lottery: I landed a job at an awesome company supporting their use of open-source software. Then I did it again with a different open-source project, and then yet again with another open-source project.

I soon met others who similarly "won the lottery" and found themselves supporting open-source technologies for various companies. I discovered that our stories had many common elements.

While I cannot guarantee you will obtain your dream job, I can teach you about these common elements and how they helped me, and others, turn community involvement in an open-source project into a personally fulfilling career.

Transcript

1. 08 May 2015 From Open Source community involvement to career... The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...
2. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. –Sir Isaac Newton
3. How did I get so lucky? I have a career in Open Source... I hit the jackpot!
4. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. –Seneca
5. “I'm a greater believer in LUCK, and I find the harder I WORK, the more I have of it.” –Thomas Jefferson
6. Survivorship Bias, Luck, & Mindset http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
7. Survivorship Bias The Misconceptions: ✤ You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
8. Survivorship Bias The Truth: ✤ When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible. http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
9. Survivorship Bias “Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. ... You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle.” http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
10. “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be LUCK.” –Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow"
11. Survivorship Bias “It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of magic. … The latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. … [Luck is] the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else.” http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
12. Survivorship Bias Luck is the combination of: ✤ A pattern of behaviors, that coincide with ✤ A style of understanding and interacting ✤ with events ✤ and people
13. Survivorship Bias Unlucky People: ✤ Narrowly focused ✤ Crave security ✤ More anxious ✤ Instead of willingly approaching unknown outcomes: ✤ Fixate on controlling situations ✤ Seek specific goals with no room for randomness.
14. Fixed Mindset A “Fixed Mindset” leads to a desire to look smart and a tendency to... ✤ Avoid challenges ✤ Give up easily in the face of obstacles ✤ See effort as fruitless ✤ Ignore useful feedback or criticism ✤ Feel threatened by the successes of others
15. Survivorship Bias Lucky People (those who consider themselves Lucky): ✤ Constantly change routines ✤ Seek out new experiences ✤ Place themselves in situations where anything could happen more often ✤ Expose themselves to more random chance ✤ Try more things, and fail more often...
16. Growth Mindset A “Growth Mindset” leads to a desire to learn and therefore a tendency to... ✤ Embrace challenges ✤ Persist in the face of obstacles ✤ See effort as a path to mastery ✤ Learn from criticism ✤ Find lessons and inspiration in the successes of others
17. I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work. –Thomas Edison
18. “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” – Richard Wiseman, in an article written for “Skeptical Inquirer”
19. So, how do I do that?
20. Seek out new experiences ✤ Community involvement ✤ Grow your skill set
21. ✤ The part of LUCK that includes “interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life,” including: ✤ Changing routines ✤ Placing yourself in situations where anything could happen ✤ Being exposed to more random chance ✤ The part of LUCK that demonstrates: ✤ Evidence of “experiences” ✤ You’ve learned, and can continue learning. Community Skills Definitions:
22. ✤ Self Community Skills
23. In the beginning, there was a penguin...
24. ✤ Self ✤ User Groups & Meetups ✤ *NIX ✤ Server Management Community Skills
25. “It's not what you know, but who you know that counts…” –Tired, Overused Proverb
26. ✤ Self ✤ User Groups & Meetups ✤ IRC Community Skills ✤ *NIX ✤ Server Management
27. Try more things, fail more often... Don't be afraid to walk away from a job that is not a good fit.
28. And then came the Beastie...
29. ✤ Self ✤ User Groups & Meetups ✤ IRC ✤ Friends & Family ✤ *NIX ✤ Server Management Community Skills
30. Try more things, fail more often... Find a niche that speaks to you.
31. Constantly change routines... "If you're not the worst musician in in your band, you should immediately switch bands." –Common saying among jazz musicians
32. ✤ Self ✤ User Groups & Meetups ✤ IRC ✤ Friends & Family ✤ Recruiters ✤ *NIX ✤ Server Management ✤ Shell Scripting ✤ SEC Community Skills
33. Always be polite to recruiters. Always.
34. Try more things, fail more often... Find a niche that speaks to you.
35. Zabbix The monitoring era begins...
36. ✤ Self ✤ User Groups & Meetups ✤ IRC ✤ Friends & Family ✤ Recruiters ✤ Forums & Email Lists ✤ Blogging ✤ *NIX ✤ Server Management ✤ Shell Scripting ✤ SEC ✤ Monitoring (Zabbix) ✤ Python Community Skills
37. GitHub Social coding goes mainstream.
38. How Lucky? ✤ Seek out new experiences ✤ Place themselves in situations where anything could happen more often ✤ Expose themselves to more random chance ✤ Try more things, and fail more often...
39. “Publish Or Perish” –Academics Everywhere
40. git push and flourish
41. ✤ Constantly change routines ✤ Seek out new experiences ✤ Place themselves in situations where anything could happen more often ✤ Expose themselves to more random chance ✤ Try more things, and fail more often... ✤ Narrowly focused ✤ Crave security ✤ More anxious ✤ Instead of willingly approaching unknown outcomes: ✤ Fixate on controlling situations ✤ Seek specific goals with no room for randomness. “Lucky” “Unlucky”
42. ✤ Constantly change routines ✤ Seek out new experiences ✤ Place themselves in situations where anything could happen more often ✤ Expose themselves to more random chance ✤ Try more things, and fail more often... ✤ Narrowly focused ✤ Shows controlled situations ✤ Cannot show how you respond to randomness. ✤ Ineffective at demonstrating your “Luck” “Lucky” Résumés
43. Résumés Are Dead by Richie Norton
44. Start Something Stupid ✤ Create a program that solves a problem at your work ✤ Create a community ✤ Start helping others succeed with no anticipation of reward ✤ Write an app that does something you want, even if it seems silly. ✤ ???
45. “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” –Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow"
46. “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” –Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow" Try more things, fail more often...
47. Steve Jobs As a college dropout, he and a few friends started building computers in his parent's garage. He was booted out of his own company. He kept going, and dared “to be one of the crazy ones.”
48. Linus Torvalds He was just a college student when he started work on the Linux kernel.
49. Shay Banon Wanted to remake his single-node search product into something more scalable. The result was Elasticsearch.
50. Jordan Sissel Created tools to help him be a better SysAdmin. Logstash was one of these tools.
51. Rashid Khan Was dissatisfied with the "Logstash Web" tool. Created Kibana as a replacement.
52. Logstash A new toy becomes an obsession...
53. The ELK Stack ...before there was even a company!
54. ✤ Self ✤ User Groups & Meetups ✤ IRC ✤ Friends & Family ✤ Recruiters ✤ Forums & Email Lists ✤ Blogging ✤ GitHub ✤ *NIX ✤ Server Management ✤ Shell Scripting ✤ SEC ✤ Monitoring (Zabbix) ✤ Python Community Skills
55. Curator Managing your Elasticsearch indices
56. What now?
57. “Change” your mind ✤ Overcome Survivorship Bias ✤ Practice the skills of success to become “lucky” ✤ Develop a growth mindset
58. ✤ Constantly change routines ✤ Seek out new experiences ✤ Place themselves in situations where anything could happen more often ✤ Expose themselves to more random chance ✤ Try more things, and fail more often... ✤ Narrowly focused ✤ Crave security ✤ More anxious ✤ Instead of willingly approaching unknown outcomes: ✤ Fixate on controlling situations ✤ Seek specific goals with no room for randomness. “Lucky” “Unlucky”
59. Service: Helping others ✤ Serve one or more communities by helping others find solutions to their problems: ✤ Online: ✤ IRC, Forums, Email Lists, Blogs, GitHub, etc. ✤ Offline: ✤ User Groups, Meetups, Conventions, etc.
60. Participation: Ask Questions ✤ Ask for help ✤ Be careful of “RTFM” communities, but do not follow suit. ✤ Share the knowledge you’ve gained by helping someone else with the same question (Service!)
61. Creation: Build something ✤ Build something... ✤ ...new! ✤ ...that supports another project! ✤ ...that makes your job (or your co-worker’s jobs) easier. ✤ Then share it with others (GitHub, etc.)
62. 08 May 2015 Change yourself, change the world. Take that first step...