Luis Ibáñez works as Senior Software Engineer at Google Inc in Chicago. Opinions expressed in this site are his own.You can find him in github at: http://www.github.com/luisibanezand in twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/luisibanezHe previously worked as a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA). At Kitware he was closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK).Luis is a strong supporter of Open Access, and one of the editors of the Insight Journal, an OA Journal that enforces the verification of reproducibility. In collaboration with other instructors, Luis taught a course on Open Source Software Practices at RPI between 2007 and 2013, and also at the State University of New York at Albany between 2011 and 2014.Luis Ibáñez received a B.S. in Physics from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) in 1989 and a M.S. in Optics from the same university in 1994. He received a D.E.A and Ph.D. degrees from the Universite de Rennes I (Rennes, France) in 1995 and 2000, respectively. In 1999, Luis Ibáñez joined the Division of Neurosurgery of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and participated as a member of the MIDAG and CADDLab groups. His work at UNC was related to the development of algorithms for 2 and 3D registration applied to image guided surgery. He also participated as developer of the INSIGHT Registration and Segmentation Toolkit sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. Luis Ibáñez joined Kitware, Inc. in February 2002 where he was one of the main developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) coordinating its maintenance with other developers and the user community; he is also one of the main developers of the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and participated in crafting the operational principles of the Insight Journal. Luis Ibáñez is a strong supporter of Open Access, and the verification of reproducibility in scientific publications and is a regular speaker in ITK training courses, and in events disseminating the principles of Open Source. In August 2014, Luis joined Google Inc as Software Engineer, to work with the corporate engineering team in New York city.
Authored Comments
Sum,
You bring up a good point.
Yes, not only women are under-represented in open source. Many other groups are under-represented as well. Including Black and Latino populations, and even more in the US: native Americans.
So, even though this track is focused on women, the overarching theme is really about diversity. This is critical for the environment of open source, where open innovation is nurtured by the diverse background and thinking of the participants, and therefore the more diverse we can make our communities, the better will be for all of us.
We recently made the case as well for younger participants (in the context of the Linux Kernel):
https://opensource.com/education/13/11/linux-kernel-community-growth
The bottom line is that we have to watch the barriers of entry in our communities, and make sure that we make them as low as possible, while at the same time we reach out to populations that we know are under-represented.
Note that lowering barriers of entry does not mean reducing quality. What it means, is the we make a more focused effort on training and documentation, to make easier for newcomers to come up to speed on projects.
See for example the great job that OpenStack is doing in that front:
http://www.openstack.org/software/start/
or what the Sahana humanitarian project does:
http://sahanafoundation.org/programs/training/
Luis
Many open source projects will have a web page with Job opportunities.
See for example in OpenStack
https://www.openstack.org/community/jobs/
Depending on your background, skills and interests, you may want to check on the open source projects that are in that field, and check their pages for Job positions.
In some cases, you may have to first get familiar with the companies that work in that space. For example, if you are interested on Android, you get to look at Samsung, LG, Asus...; or if you are interested in the Linux Kernel and/or embedded systems you can check the members of the Linux Foundation: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members, or the list of contributing companies to the Linux Kernel: https://opensource.com/education/13/11/linux-kernel-community-growth.
If you go to Netflix's - job web page,
and filter by "open source" you will see 24 positions open:
http://jobs.netflix.com/search.php
The jobs are out there, it just may take one or two redirections in some cases, to find them.
Note that one of the values of contributing to open source projects is that one gets to build an open resume (some call this Resume 2.0), made out of the public contributions made to projects, that prospective employers can check to get a clear idea of a person level of skills. Github has become lately an integral part of the process of hiring developers, since job applicants can point to their own code, that is in public repositories for all to see.
Shameless plug:
At Kitware,
the open source company where I work,
we are hiring too ;-)
http://jobs.kitware.com/
Luis