One of the questions I’m always asked is how to get experience in tech writing. It’s a chicken/egg problem: you need a job to get experience, but you need experience to get a job. You can attend a code camp or complete a certificate program to get some real-world experience to add to your resume, but what I always tell people is to get started with open-source software.

There is a lot of open-source software out there these days. I got started in computing before this was the case, but was an early adopter of the Linux OS in the early 90s, which changed everything. Now, entire communities have sprung up around the development of operating systems, servers, programming languages, and desktop software. Tools like GitHub have centralized participation, putting source code in a centralized location, and providing tools for quick communication about projects, instead of crufty old mailing lists. It’s made it very easy to explore projects and contribute to them.

Here’s a great article about how to get started on this:

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/contributing-to-open-source-is-not-hard-here-is-my-journey-to-contributing-to-nodejs-d10760e31194

This example is specifically about a developer contributing to the Node.js programming language. But there are a lot of opportunities for tech writers, because documentation for projects is not always that great. The only issue is that there aren’t always that many documentation bugs listed in projects. It requires hunting down a project you like (check out the “explore” section of GitHub to browse through things) and deciding what needs improvement.

Overall, it’s a great way to gain experience, and also improve tools that everyone will use. And, maybe you’ll someday get a job out of it.