My Hacktoberfest Experience

I was waiting for a chance to contribute to Open Source projects, not as a continuation of my studies, but as voluntary work. There are thousands of Open Source projects out there and, believe it or not, around the same number of guides. But, still, it is a daunting task to find a good first project.

Hacktoberfest intrigued me to put more effort into this longtime plan. It is a month-long program in October, organized by Digital Ocean in collaboration with Github, to promote Open Source contributions. It is open to everyone and if you make four successful pull requests in participating Github repositories, you can earn a T-shirt at the end. Hacktoberfest is also a great opportunity to explore Github, learn how to make pull requests, and engage in Open Source communities.

I started my journey on October 5th. The first step was to read the resources available on the Hacktoberfest website. It is essential to learn about eligible pull requests, participating repositories, and the Github labels before heading into Github. I knew basic Git commands before Hacktoberfest, but if you are not familiar with Git and Github, it is pretty easy to learn and you can find resources here.

Hacktoberfest is a great opportunity to get into Open Source. You can find many repositories on Github with issues labelled Hacktoberfest. The sheer number of repositories make it difficult to find good issues. However, I found that the explore and trending pages on Github are good places to start your search. You can limit the results based on the programming language, or you can look for labels such as “first-times-only” or “good-first-issue”. These are issues that do not need huge investments, in terms of time and commitment, and can help you get the hang of it. I used the Hacktoberfest 2020 repository by CodeTrophs to practice submitting a pull request before my first contribution. But to receive a T-shirt, I needed to find four good issues.

Previously, I was familiar with some well-known projects such as FreeCAD or FEniCS, but solving the issues in their projects was demanding and I was looking for some issues that can be solved in a couple of hours. After much exploration, I found two interesting and cool repository.

The first one is called “city-scrapers”, with the aim to develop a community Open Source project to scrape and store public meetings in a central database and is run by City Bureau. I had some experience with scraping websites and they had many great issues and a straightforward contribution tutorial. While contributing to this project, I learned about numerous public hearings and meetings in US cities and also found that many public websites are not well-maintained. Also, as my first experience, I found the maintainers to be super friendly, providing very timely and accurate comments on my code. The encouraging feedback from the community is a cherry on the top. I submitted my first real pull-request on October 14th, and it took me just 4 days to finish four pull requests.

The second repository is “remote-jobs” that contains a list of fully or semi remote-friendly companies. Unlike the first one, the issues in this repository were not listed, but I could choose a company from their list and add more details about their size, location, and available jobs. Since they did not have a list of issues, I first checked the pull requests waiting to be merged and then chose a company that was not added yet. It was a straightforward task since I was familiar with Markdown and they had numerous examples.

Finding a repository to start contributing to the Open Source community might not be easy for everybody, but Hacktoberfest is a great time to explore different projects and find something that works for you. Your first contribution does not have to be great. Start with small issues and learn about the process. Engage with the community and learn from them. If you are looking for more interesting projects, check the stars on Github. I found that some people make repositories just during the Hacktoberfest and their repository does not have proper contribution guidelines. Maintainers are happy to answer your questions and provide support. Do not hesitate to ask for clarifications.

I am now waiting for my Hacktoberfest T-shirt and it might take a while due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, it feels good to be part of a project that matters and also get a reward for that. Contributing to the Open Source made me a better developer with a greater desire to share my code with others and boosted my confidence. Hacktoberfest will not be my last contribution to this fantastic community.