Meh, I expected this was true. However, after 6(?) years of maintaining a moderately popular project (~10k stars), it hasn't amounted to much real external value. It has never come up in interviews, it has never led to any job offers, it's mostly just a thing I work on for free which people happen to like.
It’s your job to highlight your relevant skills and experience during interviews. It’s especially important to be proactive about unusual experience that canned questions won’t hit, like an OSS project you run or a book you wrote. Remember that having something good is NEVER enough. You HAVE to tell people about it.
Case in point - you don’t even link the project in your comment! I can’t even begin to give you specific advice because I don’t know anything about your project beyond its age and basic popularity tier. Maybe it’s super relevant to me and I would benefit from bringing you in for some consulting. We’ll never know because you didn’t mention the crucial details.
Here are some generic things you can try:
- Don’t be afraid to mention your specific project in relevant settings, like this forum or an interview.
- Use examples from your project to answer questions (“Sure I know about X, I considered using that when my project needed Y, and my benchmarking eventually suggested Z was better in that instance”)
- List the OSS project on your resume like a job (“Primary Maintainer, MyLibrary, 2012-. Designed, Implemented and Maintained a library with 12,000 github stars. Reviewed and merged 300 community pull requests. Implemented CI/CD...”)
- Identify corporate users of your OSS and proactively offering consulting
- Speak at conferences/meetups focused on your programming language/ framework /industry
- Blog about the project and your experiences with it
Which is too bad. I want money!