Hacktoberfest is Here!
Let’s be real, I only made this post for the sweet, sweet Hacktoberfest PR. I just want a T shirt.
If you’re not already aware, Hacktoberfest takes place during the month of October and is an initiative sponsored by Digital Ocean (among others) to encourage contributions to open source software. Once you have 4 qualifying pull requests be merged to a participating project, you’ll earn a swag kit.
It’s a big deal for a ton of “developers”. I put them in quotes here because of all the drama from last year as well as this year where people were submitting spam PRs with bogus small changes to try to game the system. (Spoilers: don’t to this.) It adds a ton of extra work to product maintainers and goes against the entire spirit of the event.
On the other hand, I am a huge fan of Hacktoberfest. I’ve participated for the last 2 years and have the swag to prove it! I think it gives people great incentive to not only try out great new software, but also potentially contribute to it and make it better. It’s super helpful for new developers as well, since there is clear guidance for how new developers should contribute and project maintainers can offer help-wanted tags and other advice for how they can make meaningful changes – a lot of them will walk you through the PR process for their particular project!
Of course, it’s always great to have these great maintainers, so a huge shoutout goes to them for all their hard work because as we’ve seen, it ends up being at least a moderate amount of extra work and at worst it is a nightmare given all the spam PR bullshit that was previously mentioned.
Opening My Repos for Hacktoberfest
I know it’s already halfway through October (sorry!), but starting today I am opening a few of my repositories up for Hacktoberfest contributions. There’s already a few contributions that have been made this month and I’d like to continue that trend. I’ll be marking the PR with the hacktoberfest-accepted label for each PR that’s made in the month of October so you can be sure that it will count towards your totals. Most of these projects are ones that I’ve written about in the past, so feel free to check older posts for backstory on lots of these repositories.
Qualifying Hacktoberfest repositories:
Others are available! If you see a repo you’d like to contribute to, don’t hesitate to open an PR and request the Hacktoberfest tag!
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!