When it comes to open source on GitHub, what most people miss is that you don't necessarily need to do it in your free time. This is in general a misconception.

When it comes to open source on GitHub, what most people miss is that you don't necessarily need to do it in your free time. This is in general a misconception. There are actually two scenarios which don't involve coding in your free time: 1. As software developers we are generating by-products all the time. And the trained eye can recognize reusable scripts that can be packaged and placed on GitHub. If you don't have a GitHub account with such by-products, then you probably have rotting folders on your hard drive with reusable stuff that will eventually wither away. Good companies encourage or at least tolerate employees that do this, because it leads to higher quality code (by putting it out there, preparing it for the scrutiny of others), because it's good marketing for reaching job candidates and because once in a while such a projects ends up having other users, which end up contributing feedback, bug fixes or even features, aka work for free. 2. We end up using a lot of open-source libraries and tools and we don't have the resources to pay for support for all of them, plus if we are honest about it, we are cheap bastards in terms of wanting to pay other people money for the tools we depend on. Open-source is a about having control. Does it have a bug, or a feature missing? You can code it yourself and send a PR. Which in many cases is quite easy if you've been working with the library or tool in question for a longer time — all it takes is for you to know what's needed. As a software developer, you might work in an industry that doesn't benefit much from open-source, or in a company that doesn't allow such contributions. Which is fine, but know that in many companies the people that have public projects to show the world will get picked over those that don't. It's simple market economics really — in absence of open source contributions, all you have to show for your work at that cool startup is a nice story of how it died or went sour. And some ranty blog posts.