With the intense competition for jobs, students need to show that they go the extra mile. Yes, employers are looking for computer scientists who stay up into the night tinkering on their pet coding projects. Working on Open Source projects not only gives students a great opportunity to use, understand and contribute to the latest and greatest code, but it also puts their work out in the open where it can be seen and appreciated by users, developers and potential employers. It also opens them up to scrutiny with the Open Source community showing employers that students can hold their own and produce code of a high standard.
Google has a many open source projects including a summer of code.
http://code.google.com/opensource/
At Heriot-Watt, in conjunction with Google, we run events such as The 2012 Ethical Hackathon which gets students used to developing code in teams that can be made open source.
Google has a many open source projects including a summer of code.
http://code.google.com/opensource/
At Heriot-Watt, in conjunction with Google, we run events such as The 2012 Ethical Hackathon which gets students used to developing code in teams that can be made open source.
