February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
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Chapter 34. Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source
CHANCES ARE PRETTY GOOD that you are not developing software at work that fulfills your most ambitious software development daydreams. Perhaps you are developing software for a huge insurance company when you would rather be working at Google, Apple, Microsoft, or your own startup developing the next big thing. You’ll never get where you want to go developing software for systems you don’t care about.
Fortunately, there is an answer to your problem: open source. There are thousands of open source projects out there, many of them quite active, which offer you any kind of software development experience you could want. If you love the idea of developing operating systems, go help with one of the dozen operating system projects. If you want to work on music software, animation software, cryptography, robotics, PC games, massive online player games, mobile phones, or whatever, you’ll almost certainly find at least one open source project dedicated to that interest.
Of course, there is no free lunch. You have to be willing to give up your free time because you probably cannot work on an open source video game at your day job—you still have a responsibility to your employer. In addition, very few people make money contributing to open source projects—some do, but most don’t. You should be willing to give up some of your ...