One night, while reading various tech articles online, I stumbled upon Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest 2019 is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean and DEV. Apparently, it's been running for years now every from October 1 to 31. They reward anyone who make 4 valid pull requests on any Github repositories with a cool T-shirt and stickers. The pull requests doesn't even need to be technical. Aside from code, they can be design, documentation, and other minor changes.
I found it interesting. While I have already made some small open source contributions before and plan to do more and better ones in the future, I decided to join it this year. Finishing the challenge would give me some minor acccomplishment especially at a time I'm a bit feeling down. It would also motivate me in the stuff I'm doing now and planning to do.
I was looking through the suggested repositories and issues. Some looks spammy while the others are a bit more complicated for me. I decided to just do small contributions to the group where I've been a part of for more than 7 years.
I did it!
I'm not sure if I'm doing it again next year. We'll see... It might be better if people can contribute to my Github repositories during (or even outside the month of) Hacktoberfest too but helping others in their open source projects is good too.
The Hacktoberfest 2019 shirt
If you haven't contributed yet to open source, Hacktoberfest is definitely a great way to get started. But you don't need to wait for another October to start contributing. You can start now.
