2025: Open Source as the Only Way to Enter the Job Market
How to find your first open source crypto project and why right now it's more important than ever.
(Just a bit of native ads) TLDR: just use https://opencryptolist.xyz and find your first issue literally in 3 clicks.
(I) Preamble for oldfags: 💀 Juniors RIP (soon) 💀
I've been reading Hacker News comments and noticing that the barrier to entry into IT is rising. Junior developers are being laid off en masse and replaced by LLMs.
Remember how people used to enter the profession? You'd get hired by a company, be given small tasks, and learn the job that way. Well, AI is disrupting that process now. A lot of basic operations: from debugging code to handling documents can easily be done by language models.
These kinds of tasks used to be a sort of "playground" for newcomers. Through small assignments, people would get familiar with the specifics of the work and gain experience to grow further. But now, thanks to AI, that stepping stone on the career ladder is disappearing. Beginners are being forced to learn and master skills on the fly, essentially skipping the traditional "start from the basics."
At the same time, according to Indeed, in two thirds of all job positions, more than half of the required skills can already be performed by generative AI, which only makes the situation worse.
For now, the demand for junior staff hasn't vanished, although it has clearly become much harder for graduates to find a job. Companies expect junior specialists to already possess advanced skills: a basic understanding of how to work with AI, the ability to learn independently, and so on.
(II) Why Contribute to Open Source?
There are two main reasons to contribute to open source:
- Give Back: If you've benefited from software written and freely shared by others, you might want to pay it forward. Contributing is a great way to say thanks to the community.
- Advance Your Career: Especially if you're new to coding, contributing to open source gives you real-world experience. It boosts your resume and helps you network with other developers. Many opportunities come through open-source visibility.
Whatever your motivation, most open-source projects are happy to have contributors, as long as you follow the guidelines and make meaningful contributions.
(III) So, Why Now?
Let's say you're a college student who just started learning blockchain development.
Or maybe you're already a software engineer, but you've never touched blockchain before. You want to get experience by contributing to a real open-source repository.
So, what should juniors do?
Want to grow as a developer and land a great job? Start building real experience. Work on real projects. Do it now – before it's too late. And of course, do it with your Cursor-bro (but be careful with Opus 4, it can get expensive) .
Don't waste your time just sitting around — get involved in open source projects.
It's the easiest way to get into top-tier dev teams and add real projects to your resume, instead of showing off some random code snippets.
But let's be honest: finding the right project to contribute to is hard. That's when laziness and excuses start creeping in – and with them comes a lack of professional growth, no meaningful feedback from experienced devs, burnout, and stagnation.
(IV) My Personal Experience
What separates us from LLMs?
When we see repetitive code, we abstract it into functions, classes, libraries. When a DB is hard to work with, we build a framework or ORM. We define responsibilities, test in isolation, reuse code. That's DRY. If LLMs take away that pain, DRY might disappear altogether. Code will turn into unreadable spaghetti. Projects will bloat to the point where no human and no LLM can manage them.
Open source is the ultimate form of DRY.
OSS has helped me get jobs, more than once:
- I skipped live coding interviews because hiring managers were impressed by my open-source libs
- I got invited to interviews because people were using my tiny library (only 15 stars!)
- An interviewer had read my article about ActionCable and was using my code snippet — our whole interview went in a different, better direction
- HR bots scan GitHub activity for keywords and contributions, which triggers interview invites
- A public repo means you never have to provide "a sample of your code" again. It's already out there
Take this example.
If someone adds support for authenticated proxies in gocolly, I can instantly tell four things:
- He writes in Go
- He works with proxies
- He ran into a non-trivial problem
- He spent time analyzing the lib and didn't just smash two buttons: "vibe-code" + "apply"
That's what OSS signals: proactive problem solving. Not just a quick monkeypatch in your codebase, but sharing a fix with the community.
(V) Sold. Let's start contributing
There are tons and tons of open source projects on GitHub that need help from contributors. Sometimes, the GitHub search bar is not the best for trying to find issues and projects. I cannot tell you how many times I have stumbled upon a random repository trying to understand whether I want to contribute there or not.
Okay, we need to check 43 repos to decide on how to contribute to Solana.
So, contributors. Here's the issue — it's issues. Issues are important for tracking development and progress in a project. There's a wide range of issues from fixing mere spelling mistakes to figuring out how to build a space-time continuum in your backyard (okay, maybe not that crazy) but you get what I mean.
Okay, anza-xyz/agave seems nice, what now?
There's so many projects and issues out there, but trying to find the right one for you is another story. So I went on the hunt to find other resources that made finding projects and good first issues on GitHub easier, but haven't found any related to blockchain industry. Soooo I created my own.
Say hi to this little boy – OpenCryptoList.xyz . Find your first issue literally in 3 clicks.
Discover beginner-friendly issues in Web3, DeFi, and cryptocurrency projects.
This is a non-commercial project, therefore I don't have any guilt in advertising it. BUT!
It would not be honest not to mention alternatives. What are they?
- goodfirstissue.dev: You can find several good first issues with the option to choose your preferred language through a friendly user interface. While limited to filtering only by a given programming language, it generally inspired me to make goodfirstissue for web3.
2. Up-for-grabs.net is one of the most popular websites to find good open-source projects
3. https://firstcontributions.github.io/ is a website where you can search projects from a pre-defined list using your preferred language as a filter.
4. https://github.com/trending — trending repositories
(V) Extra: Pro Tips for First-Time Contributors
- Start small: You don't have to jump into solving a critical issue right away. Start by fixing typos, improving documentation, or working on small bugs to familiarize yourself with the codebase.
- Ask for help: The open-source community is welcoming. Don't hesitate to ask questions on GitHub or community forums.
- Learn as you go: Every contribution is a learning opportunity. You'll improve your blockchain knowledge and coding skills by diving into real-world problems
Thanks for reading this article! Drop your PRs in the comments section :)
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