Is it worth contributing to Tilck for my career?

[vvaltchev]

How contributing to Tilck will help with my career? Will it allow me to become a professional kernel engineer? How does that compare to contributing to bigger open source projects like Linux? How about writing something on my own instead?

[vvaltchev]

Generally, contributing to open source projects, have a positive correlation with the number of career opportunities, in particular if the desired positions are in the same field as the open source contributions. The closer the match, the bigger will be the impact, because recruiters and hiring managers will have some concrete evidence for person's skills in that field, backed by peer-reviews.

In addition to that, the more popular (and big) the open source project is, the bigger the impact of your contributions will be on your resume/CV. For example, contributing to the Linux kernel is very well recognized by everyone, but it is very hard to do so, in particular for inexperienced developers. Even small fixes require a significant effort in order to the patch to be accepted the my maintainers; I'm not talking about kernel janitor work like coding style fixes etc. I'm talking about a real bugfix leading to wrong behavior or crash. Medium-sized projects like Tilck are relatively easier to contribute to when compared to Linux, but have a smaller impact on the resume if we're talking about a comparable feature/bugfix. In other words, a small bugfix in Linux is comparable to a medium-sized change in Tilck in terms of effort and impact. Therefore, if we normalize according to the difficulty and amount of effort spent, contributing to medium or big open source projects might have a similar effect on your resume. It all comes down your preference: working on a smaller project and make a significant impact there or working on a big world-class project and have a minuscule impact instead. Both approaches make sense.

For smaller single-person open source projects, it's a bit different because there is no peer review for your work. Therefore, in order to have the same impact as a small contribution to a popular project, your private one-man project needs to be literally impressive and gain a significant amount of recognition by other developers through stars & forks. While definitively possible, it is probably the hardest path to take.

Back to Tilck, contributions to this project will help you proportionally to the size and impact of your work. Also, how impressed people will be by your results will partially depend on their subjective opinion about this project. Some people will be impressed more than others. So far, I got positive feedback from many people including professional Linux kernel engineers, recruiters and hiring managers in big companies, but I cannot offer any guarantees to you.

It's worth also mentioning that contributing even to medium-sized kernel project like this one is not a joke: depending on what you're aiming at achieving, it might be very hard to do so. I'm talking about months of full-time hard work for a feature that has a significant impact.

If you wanna become a kernel engineer and find a job as such in a big company, contributing to the Tilck kernel is certainly one of the many ways to achieve that, but it might require even an year or more of full-time and hard work to get there, depending on your pre-existing skills and knowledge. The effort required is similar to other possible paths to achieve the same result: there is no easy way to become a kernel developer. Overall, becoming a kernel engineer is a career path that I would recommend only to people extremely passionate about operating systems, willing to invest a long time to get a tangible result in terms of job opportunities.