Career Opportunities

Taking the lead on an open-source project can act as a portfolio showcasing technical skills, creativity, and leadership, making women more attractive to potential employers. Open-source contributions are highly valued in the tech industry and can open up new career paths, including roles at top tech companies.

Taking the lead on an open-source project can act as a portfolio showcasing technical skills, creativity, and leadership, making women more attractive to potential employers. Open-source contributions are highly valued in the tech industry and can open up new career paths, including roles at top tech companies.

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Nikki Adjei
DevOps Engineer

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES: WHY OPEN SOURCE MATTERS

When I started learning DevOps, which feels like quite a while ago, although it really wasn’t that long ago, I was introduced to open source.

I remember my tutor emphasising how important it was to understand and use open-source tools.

At the time, it didn’t quite sink in.

I had so many other tools to learn and was trying to understand how everything fitted together.

I remember creating my infrastructure using IaC and pushing the files to an open-source repository. We would then get together as a group to study and talk through what we were doing.
Branches.
Forking.
Pull requests.

At the beginning, a lot of it didn’t make much sense.

But as I continued learning and gaining more experience, those things started to make sense.

Looking back, open-source collaboration is one area I wish I had focused on more.

Not just learning how to use open-source tools, but actually contributing to projects and working alongside other people.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER FOR YOUR CAREER?
One of the biggest benefits of contributing to open source is that you’re not just learning a technical skill.

You’re learning how to work with other people.
You’re learning how to navigate code you didn’t create.
You’re learning how to read someone else’s Terraform configuration, understand an existing AWS environment, investigate an issue and make changes without breaking what is already there.

That is much closer to the reality of working in DevOps.

Building your own infrastructure from scratch is valuable.
But working in an environment that someone else has created teaches you something different.
You have to understand what is already there before deciding what needs to change.
You may review someone’s work, suggest an improvement, raise an issue, create a pull request or make changes based on feedback.
You might even come across a problem you don’t immediately know how to solve.

And that is where the real learning happens.

For women looking to move into DevOps or grow their technology careers, this experience can also become part of your portfolio.

You can show potential employers more than a list of tools on your CV.
You can demonstrate that you know how to collaborate.
That you can communicate your thinking.
That you can work with people you have never met.
That you can contribute to something you didn’t build yourself.

Start by contributing to other people’s projects. As your confidence grows, you can also create your own. Starting an open-source project gives you another opportunity to demonstrate your technical skills, but also your leadership. You’re creating something, inviting others to contribute, responding to ideas and helping move the project forward. That experience can become a powerful part of your portfolio.

And most importantly, you have real examples to talk about in an interview.
Instead of saying:

“I know Terraform.”

You can talk about the project you contributed to, the problem you encountered, how you approached it, what you changed and what you learned.

That gives you something real to talk about.
It shows potential employers what you can actually do, rather than simply telling them what you know.

If you’re trying to grow in DevOps or in a tech career, don’t only build things from scratch.

Get active and step into environments you didn’t create, as well as the ones you did.

Because real DevOps and tech roles are not about knowing everything.

They're about being able to look at something unfamiliar, work out how it fits together and figure out what to do next.

That’s a skill worth developing.

And open source is one of the places where you can start building it.

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