[OH-Dev] question in regard to working on open hatch projects

[Karen West]

Hi,

I was recently advised to have a look while job searching at "open
hatch" projects, rather than just working on online
courses or projects of my own at home.  I had a look yesterday, and I
admit to being a bit baffled by how it works.
I've held positions as a contributor to development code, and a
software tester of development code, and also once
in a support role, where you take bugs out of a bug database, and try
to determine the problem and suggest a fix to
it to either the application or firmware teams.

When I had a quick peak yesterday under the "C", "Python" and "RTEMS"
projects, since most of my professional
experience was in C for embedded systems, and I just took a Python
course, and I've signed up for a number of online
courses to expand on these areas, (and was also recently told the C++
I did years ago was currently rusty), well when
I clicked on those areas which are considered strong for me in the
open source project list, I saw that it reminded me
of a bug database, similar to the support role I once held.

So my question is as follows: In my role where I took bugs from a
database and tried to fix one of them, we had access
to all the firmware, and if it was associated with a specific
application, the app code as well, along with documentation.
We built the entire piece of code and tried to reproduce the problem
(also on a specific embedded device), suggest a solution, and even
test our recommendation, before putting that in the bug database.  It
was unclear to me how this would work on open hatch, since it seemed
to just list problems within a bug database, without any further
information.

The people who suggested that I do an open hatch project while job
searching, rather than just doing online courses
or my own projects, seemed sincere in their recommendation, but to me
when I investigated yesterday, it was unclear
to me how to get involved there, based on my former experience.

Thank you in advance, if you can help explain how this works!
Karen West