Careers with Canonical

[chandler_bailey2]

Hello everyone,

I'm 15 and I live in southeast US. I'm very bright and creative with an interest in computing. With a humanitarian mindset, I'm drawn towards Ubuntu and the open-source/free software movement.

Being a sophomore in high school, it's becoming time to look for colleges and careers that interest me. I would love to be some sort of engineer. I was recently looking around Canonical's career offerings and saw an opening for an in-home software engineer. (obviously I can't apply now!) But being a novice in programming and developing (I'm taking a web page design class this year), what steps should I take to become more knowledgeable in this area? Any tools you can recommend to me?

It's early and I want to get on the right track to land a job in the computing industry (maybe even Microsoft/Google). Please give me any relevant advice!

[whatthefunk]

Learn a programming language. Study Computer Science in university. Program, program, program.

[ssam]

have a detailed look at jobs on http://www.canonical.com/about-canonical/careers . They mention a lot of the required skills. I'd say if you want to get picked up to work in software then getting some experience by contributing to existing opensource projects would be good. choose a project that you use and think you could improve. see if you can fixes some bugs in their bug tracker and send patches. ( https://www.ohloh.net/ is quite good for keeping track of your FOSS contributions )