Hacktoberfest
Another year, another Hacktoberfest completed. As a relative newcomer to the world of open source contribution, the Hacktoberfest concept was an excuse to step outside of my comfort zone and actually give back to the developer community that I've been living in for the past decade.
2018 was the first year that I got involved with Hacktoberfest and I won't lie, the prize was worth it.
- To enter into the big scary world of contributing to public, open-source projects
- A free t-shirt
Now, there are 2 things in the developer world that are held in high regard... stickers and t-shirts are these items. You'll find that developers bend over sideways to lay their grubby paws on company swag... don't ask me why but there are some stickers out there that are worth more than hard currency 🤣
When I saw that Dev.to and Digital Ocean were coming together to run Hacktoberfest in 2019, it was nowhere near as scary as last year as I actually kept up contributing to Open Source projects (and also released a couple of my own). 4 verified and merged pull requests later and I was on track to complete my second year of Hacktoberfest 💁♀️
If you're interested in contributing to Open Source, one thing I will say is that it's nowhere near as big and scary of a thing as I originally thought. There are countless repo's on Github that you'll be able to help with regardless of your knowledge/skillset. Just remember to follow any guidelines in the project README and adhere to the best practices of git contributions.
The biggest issue now is that I've started collecting something and as anyone who knows me personally will almost definitely verify is that I absolutely cannot start collecting something else. I already have playing cards, designer toys, keyboards, pens and notebooks! That being said, i'll be contributing to open source repo's next year regardless of Hacktoberfest!
Roll on 2020!
🡐 Older Note
Putting together a new keyboardNewer Note 🡒
Jerry's Nuggets