Thoughts on Hacktoberfest 2018

This year I took part in Hacktoberfest. Partially to see what all the fuss is about, partially to get myself involved in projects I didn’t know about, and partially for the free t-shirt (which do come in men’s and women’s cuts).  If you haven’t run into this project before it’s an effort by Digital Ocean to get people to participate in open source projects. Once you sign up they count all public pull requests you make on Github toward a goal of 5. I participated both as a developer, and by tagging a few issues on my own projects so people would find them.

As a developer:

It was a great excuse to go find new projects and look at ways I can contribute.  While I’d have plenty of experience on open source projects, often they have been outside Github or are repos I have commit access to – so I don’t open a lot of pull requests on Github. That meant that Hacktoberfest was a chance to find new projects and practice a basic process for contributing code to teams.

In that regard it was a pretty good success. I opened six PRs on four different projects. Mostly they were small stuff like linting code, updating packages, or tweaking a README file.  

In terms of drawing me into projects we’ll see. I did keep up with one after I finished the 5 required (hence having six PRs), but I didn’t dive into anything truly hard on that project.  

In terms of getting me to provide truly useful code think that was limited. The largest piece of code I wrote was initially rejected so I re-wrote in a different style, and then re-written by the project maintainer the day after he accepted the PR. He was really nice about it, and it helped him get something done that had been on the to-do list for a long time, but even that was example code to be used in classrooms (which was why he was so concerned about style – he didn’t want it to be idiomatically correct for Python he wanted to clear to beginners).

It did give me a chance to play around in other people’s code bases and I did resolve some issues for people that would have otherwise lingered longer than they already had.  It also forced me to meet other people’s standards, lint to their specifications, and pass their automated tests – all good things for everyone to do now and again to see if there are solutions you like better than the ones you use every day.

As a project owner:

Once I got through the contributions I needed to get a shirt, I figured I’d look over my own projects to see if there were issues I could label for beginners to help them find ways to get started. I listed several issues are both Hacktoberfest and good first issues. Almost all the ones I flagged as good first issues got PRs opened – sometimes more than one.

I got two problems solved that I wouldn’t have known how to solve without a bit of research, and those were great. But most of the PRs were simple things that took me longer to solve collaboratively than it would have taken me to solve myself. That’s okay, in part because some of my PRs caused the same problem for their project maintainers, and because it forced me to final learn how to setup CircleCI so the code gets checked and tested automatically when PRs are opened in the future.

What I don’t expect it caused was anyone to be truly interested in the project and helping it move forward over time. So while I solved a couple small problems, I did not get new help that going to keep engaging. That made it useful as a sprint, but not useful to helping build great projects.

But even if there is room for improvement my shirt is ordered and on the way.