It’s that time of year again. Hacktoberfest is HERE, and I am THRILLED to do it again this year. For anyone who is not familiar with Hacktoberfest, it is a month long challenge to open 4 pull requests to any public repo on Github. (Strangely, this is one PR less than 2018…) The idea is to get more people active in the open-source community. This is my third year in a row participating, it is something I look forward to each year.
You can get the gist of what Hacktoberfest is about on their website, but I just wanted to give some exposure here. See the rules below:
To qualify for the official limited edition Hacktoberfest shirt, you must register and then make four pull requests (PRs) between October 1-31 (in any time zone). PRs can be made to any public repo on GitHub, not only the ones with issues labeled Hacktoberfest. If a maintainer reports your pull request as spam or behavior not in line with the project’s code of conduct, you will be ineligible to participate. This year, the first 50,000 participants who successfully complete the challenge will earn a T-shirt. (Last year 46,088 earned a shirt!)
Interestingly, they seem to have a waiting period on PRs this year. When you view a PR submission on your Profile, there’s
now a “maturity” count-down. It seems that Hacktoberfest is trying to combat a bit of the spammy nature that a rare to
complete 5 PRs might create (that’s probably why they decreased the PR number this year too). This maturity countdown allows
for maintainers to mark PRs as invalid towards Hacktoberfest if they are not up to the quality the maintainer sees fit. I
like this change a lot! Seems like the addition of this mission statement below is only going to be for the best:
Quantity is fun, quality is key! Participating in Hacktoberfest leads to personal growth, professional opportunities, and community building. And it all begins with meaningful contributions to open source technology.
Last year I was able to complete 5 pull-requests to open-source projects, unfortunately 3 of them were to my own open-source projects and I did have a goal to limit my self-PRs. Again, this year I really want to make an effort to contribute to 4 unique open-source projects I do not control, but I have been keeping my own projects more up-to-date, so I would not be surprised if my first 4 contributions are for my own projects. Check back here for my progress!
Open Source Pull Requests
- Submitted Update about page to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted Fix #541 to dekkerglen/CubeCobra
- Submitted moving ensureAuth to middleware file to dekkerglen/CubeCobra
- Submitted updating to most recent packages to joshfinnie/docker-nvm
Other PRs that have been submitted this month
- Submitted adding hacktoberfest post to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted Fixing p1p1 seeding to dekkerglen/CubeCobra
- Submitted WIP updating the cube route to show a different way of doing it to dekkerglen/CubeCobra
- Submitted adding docker talk to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted Manualy bump gatsby-plugin-sharp from 2.2.11 to 2.2.28 to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted bumping to v1.1.2 to joshfinnie/pushfile
- Submitted Adding the ability to follow cubes to dekkerglen/CubeCobra
- Submitted updating the css to be a bit more dry to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted updating nvm to use node v12 to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted trying 3.7 & 3.8… to joshfinnie/findb
- Submitted updating CSS with some new colors to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted adding rss to joshfinnie/joshfinnie.com
- Submitted WIP inital setup of prettier and eslint using airbnb standards to dekkerglen/CubeCobra
Conclusion
This has to be the fastest I have ever completed Hacktoberfest. I actually had four PRs submitted to my profile by October 1st. I have to say it’s pretty great to have a new side project to work on. CubeCobra has been a lot of fun to participate in, and you can see that 6 of my above PRs have been helping out on that repository. The other PRs are, again, for my personal open-source projects. At least this year I was able to touch 4 different personal projects. I am happy that I have successfully completed Hacktoberfest even without PRs to my own repositories, but it’s also nice to see how many PRs I am actually opening again. It’s been a long time for me to feel motivated to contribute to open-source projects, so that’s GREAT. Next year I will definitely have a more restrictive goal (i.e. no personal deployments or 4 different open-source projects that I do not own.)
What was your favorite contribution for Hacktoberfest, share them with me on Twitter @joshfinnie!