I got involved with the PHP internals because I didn’t want to use curl just to get SSL support into PHP’s fopen wrappers.

At first, I thought I could do this as part of a work project, but time pressure meant that we went with curl. In my spare time, I continued to build out what would eventually become the Streams layer in PHP.

I did this because it was an interesting project; I didn’t think much beyond that, and was surprised when I was invited to speak about that stuff at one of the early Dutch PHP Conferences. I got to meet face-to-face the folks I’d been communicating with via mailing lists and feel the community buzz.

As it turned out, I met what was to be my (at the time) future, and now present employer as part of this early conference exposure. I pretty much owe my career to a hobby coding project.

On the hiring side of the fence, we tend to view candidates with some kind of open source exposure as stronger candidates than those without. This is partially because it’s easier to get visibility into what they’ve done than you can get out of a resume, or some prepared code samples, but more importantly, because it demonstrates that the candidate has drive and passion for this type of work.

And that’s the important part; don’t just “do open source” to make your resume look good, do it because you really find it interesting. You owe it both to yourself (why bother with it if you don’t really want to do it?) and to the others in the community.