They Need You, Too

Been hit on the head with a brilliant-and-yet-so-obvious idea, lately?

I stepped outside today to walk our dog and stretch my legs. This is always a good time for me to listen and learn. A new episode of Jason Wood’s “The InfoSec Career Podcast” was queued up and I jumped into an interview with Kevin Johnson, CEO of Secure Ideas.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and picked up on some great bits of information concerning our information security careers. The one that grabbed my attention most is perhaps obvious – but I had never seriously considered it before. Contributing to an Open Source Software project.

Despite a long technology and security career, no one (myself included) would call me a developer. My chicken-scratch scripts win no awards. It never crossed my mind that I might support a collaboration creating products for others. And then Kevin noted that you do not need to be a coder to help. (Huh?? Back up that audio, and listen again…)

Kevin made the point that these projects need more than developers to thrive. He suggested finding a project we like, and then . . . help. Sure, these projects need developers to create the code. However, they also need people to write and review documentation. They need people to test applications. They need people to “do whatever needs to happen for that project.”

“do whatever needs to happen”

Wow! And even, Duh! But I had never thought that my skillsets might be valuable in this context.

If you read this far, tell us about your experience working on open source projects in the comments. What are your thoughts about non-programmers working on projects? Do you see that happen often? What would you like to see more?

Time to dust off my GitHub account . . .

(Oh, and if you have a career in information security, consider subscribing to Jason Wood’s “The InfoSec Career Podcast.” You might pick up that piece of information that helps you down the road.)