I've been diving into DevOps for around 7 months, completing an internship and earning AWS and GCP certifications along the way. I've picked up a lot, but I'm eager to level up my experience further and enhance my CV. I'm particularly interested in contributing to open source projects in areas like CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, or automation. I'm hoping to gain hands-on experience that I can actually include on my CV (is that acceptable, by the way?). Here are my main questions: Where should I look for open source projects that could use my DevOps skills? What's the best way for a beginner like me to get started contributing? And can open source contributions count as experience on my CV?
3 Answers
While it's not open source, I’ve been taking on DevOps challenges in my free time that you might find helpful. Check out projects on roadmap.sh – they have some practical tasks you can tackle to sharpen your skills!
One of the best ways to contribute as a beginner is by improving documentation. It’s often overlooked, and fresh eyes can spot areas that need clarification. Read the docs for a project, note any confusing parts, and suggest edits. It not only helps the community, but it'll also teach you a lot about the tool you're using!
You can start by checking out GitHub for open source projects. Just look for repositories that are tagged with 'good first issue' or 'help wanted'. Those are a great start for beginners. And yes, if your pull requests are accepted, I’d say that counts as real work experience!
Thanks for the tip about GitHub! I'll definitely keep an eye out for those tags.
Sounds interesting! I’ll look into that site for some hands-on practice.