Are you looking for a way to season up your resume? Do you need to enhance your portfolio of technical expertise so that you’re more competitive in the job market?If so, consider joining an open source project. No, you won’t get paid. Instead, you’ll be investing some of your time and enhancing your personal marketability as you gain experience in coding, bug fixing, synchronized development, and teamwork.

Benefits of Open Source Projects

With open source experience on your resume, you’ll be demonstrating qualities above and beyond simple know-how. You’ll be showing recruiters and hiring managers that your heart is in your work, and that’s a quality that will be noticed. You’ll also be showing that you have initiative. Prospective employers will see that software development is more than just a 9-to-5 job to you. They’ll see that it’s something that you do because you want to do it.

Here are three open source projects that you should consider joining so that you can boost your resume.

1. jQuery

The JavaScript library is still one of the most popular third-party additions to web pages, especially those that require a significant amount of client-side processing. It’s small, it’s fast, and it has just about any feature that a JavaScript developer could need. It simplifies document traversal, event handling, element manipulation, and even animation. It makes AJAX calls a breeze and is cross-browser compliant.

Front-end web developers looking to enhance their CSS/JavaScript experience should consider becoming part of the jQuery open source project. As noted previously, jQuery is in high demand. It’s easy to demonstrate knowledge about the library to a potential employer by saying that you’ve actually worked on the development team. Want to see how you can contribute? Check out the contributions page for details.

2. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of the Apache Software Foundation as it relates to contemporary website development. If you come across just about any web application that relies on persistence, model-view-controller architecture, and/or Java code, then you’ve probably used Apache technology. It’s almost as ubiquitous as HTML.

The good news about joining the ASF is that you can pick from one of many projects that you think would be the best way to build your skill set. There are projects that are coded in the Java programming language, while others are coded in C++. Some projects are basically utility code (e.g., Apache Commons), while other projects are used to build and deploy applications (e.g., Apache Ant).

3. GitLab

No employer will ever minimize the importance of teamwork. This is especially true when it comes to developing robust software applications. These projects will almost always demand a number of people, sometimes on different continents, working together to ensure that the finished project meets the requirements as specified by the end user(s).

That’s why code collaboration software is so important. It enables a team of people to work together, without stepping on each other’s code, to produce quality software.

GitLab is an Open Source Software repository/version control system. There are a number of these on the market, but GitLab is attractive for one very important reason: It’s free.

It’s written using Ruby on Rails, so if you’re looking for a way to impress employers looking for that expertise, then GitLab might just be your meal ticket.

Also, by working on version control software, you’ll be demonstrating an implicit knowledge of teamwork within a software development initiative. That’s going to be a selling point as well.

Finding the best Open Source project to season your experience shows that you are a dynamic and team oriented developer, and will help ensure you stay marketable as a job seeker. These are only a few of the options available; the first step is to get involved.